DVB-H Trial in Paris to Include Radio Stations

12th June 2005

The French are taking advantage of their "wait and see" approach to the adoption of new digital TV and radio systems by including radio stations in a DVB-H trial in Paris. DVB-H can carry about 6 times as many radio stations at a given level of audio quality and in the same amount of bandwidth as DAB can due to DVB-H using state-of-the-art, efficient technology compared to DAB's technology which was chosen between the late-1980s and very early-1990s.

Quoting from the digitag.org website:

"The CSA, the French broadcasting regulator, has given its approval for three trials of DVB-H mobile television service in the Paris region. After having asked Canal+, TPS and TDF to put forward a joint approach for such a trial, the CSA has confirmed that its enquiries have been satisfied. one-month technical transmission tests will be carried out on channel 37 and channel 29.
The CSA has also authorised the participation of Radio France and Radio Orient in the trials and confirmed that other similar trial requests specifically for radio services would likely be authorised.

Source: advanced-television.com"

The main reason why DVB-H can carry about 6 times as many radio stations as DAB in a given amount of bandwidth is that DVB-H uses the HE AAC (High Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding) audio codec compared to DAB using the outdated MP2 audio codec. HE AAC can provide the same level of audio quality using 48 kbps as MP2 provides at 160 kbps, which means that HE AAC is 3.3 times as efficient as MP2. In other words, using HE AAC allows 3.3 times as many radio stations to be carried in a given amount of bandwidth as MP2 allows.

The remaining increase in efficiency is due to DVB-H using 16-QAM compared to DAB using QPSK, and with everything else being equal, 16-QAM is twice as efficient as QPSK.

Just to rub salt into the wounds of UK radio listeners, the HE AAC audio codec could easily have been added to the DAB specification before DAB was introduced in the UK, but it wasn't, and the UK now looks like it is stuck with the DAB system in its current form, which is totally unsuitable for use as a digital radio system for the 21^st century because it cannot provide both good audio quality and a wide range of radio stations -- it can only provide one or the other, as is demonstrably the case in the UK at the moment where there is a wide range of radio stations, but all the music radio stations are provided at low audio quality (apart from Radio 3).