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Irish commercial radio is opposed to DAB


6th March 2008

Senior people from the Irish commercial radio groups have spoken out at the Independent Broadcasters of Ireland (IBI) conference against RTE (Ireland's equivalent of the BBC) wanting Ireland to press ahead with using the old, inefficient and highly expensive version of DAB for the country's digital radio system.

Quoting from an article in Ireland's Independent:

 

"Before embarking on the path to DAB, we "need to get a real understanding of the additional costs", [Lucy Gaffney, chairwoman of Communicorp,] stressed.

If Gaffney was lukewarm on DAB, iradio's Dan Healy was positively frigid. "What genius was it that said let's go and get the 10-year-old technology that is DAB?" he railed. "RTE need to stop this, they're hurting us", while Today FM's O'Reilly also professed to be having doubts.

 

Ireland launching DAB-only today would be utter stark staring madness. Australia is launching digital radio on 1st January 2009 using DAB+, so there's obviously no need to stick with using DAB, because there will be a wide range of DAB+ receivers available from day one. For example, the market leader, Pure Digital is moving to only selling DAB+ receivers (quote from page 23):

 

"It is planned that approximately 80% of all new PURE devices will be either DAB+ ready or DAB+ enabled by the end of 2008; and a future goal is to only sell DAB+ capable radios starting in 2009."

 

DAB+ stations have already been launched in Italy and the Czech Republic, and DAB+ stations will also be launched in Switzerland later this year and in Germany next year.

DAB+ stations can be transmitted alongside any existing DAB stations on the same "DAB" multiplex, so there is absolutely no reason to use DAB, which is extremely inefficient and expensive to transmit -- DAB+ stations cost about a third as much as DAB stations to transmit due to the fact that DAB+ is around 3 times as efficient as DAB.