President of WorldDMB was dishonest about DAB+ on BBC TV

Quentin Howard, the current President of WorldDMB and the chief executive of the Digital One national commercial multiplex operator, appeared on Working Lunch on the BBC TV programme Working Lunch on Tuesday 20th March to supposedly put viewers straight about DAB+, but all he actually ended up doing was to mis-inform viewers by giving dishonest answers.

If you want to watch the interview, here's a link to the video.

Quentin Howard was also dishonest about the sound quality you get on DAB (he called it "fantastic", when in reality it is awful and much worse than FM) and he said that "Most of the retail stores now are not selling analogue radios any more, you can only buy DAB digital radio sets", which a quick visit to the retail stores will show you is again completely untrue. But in this article I will focus on what he said about DAB+, and the following is a transcript of what was said on this subject: 

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So Quentin Howard was asked the question: "What is DAB+ going to mean?", which is a question about what will happen in the future -- not the present -- and he answered by saying that: "The answer is nothing in this country", and he went on to try and justify that answer. He was therefore obviously claiming that DAB+ will never be used in the UK. But below I will show that Ofcom and the Digital Radio Development Bureau (DRDB) are saying that DAB+ will be used in the UK, and considering that Quentin Howard is on the Board of the DRDB, he would have known this.

So why did he deny that DAB+ will be used? It's simply because the DAB industry (which includes the DAB broadcasters and manufacturers and Ofcom) is completely paranoid about consumers getting to know about DAB+, because they think that would cause a "crisis in consumer confidence" and that DAB sales would slow as a result. 

My opinion on this is simple: consumers should be provided with honest information, and they can then make their own minds up about whether they want to buy a DAB radio now and accept that it won't be able to receive any of the DAB+ stations that will likely launch in around 3 years' time; or whether they want to wait for the futureproof DAB+ receivers to hit the shops in the summer/autumn -- and it is certainly not acceptable for Quentin Howard to deny that DAB+ will ever be used in the UK.

DRDB's press release / policy statement on the switch to DAB+

The following quotes are taken from a DRDB press release / policy statement about the switch to DAB+ issued in January (although it's not available on their website), which someone sent me on Friday 23rd March:

(HE AAC v2 (High-Efficiency AAC v2)  is the official name for the AAC+ audio codec that will be used on DAB+, and by "MPEG II" the DRDB is (incorrectly) referring to the current audio codec used on DAB, better known as MP2.)

The DRDB then, more revealingly, says:

For there to be an increase in the number of AAC+ broadcasts then the DRDB must expect that there will already be some by 2010.

So while Quentin Howard is suggesting that DAB+ will never be used in the UK, the DRDB is even contemplating a time when the current MP2 services might be switched off, and they say the only requirements for this to happen are that the majority of receivers sold are capable of receiving DAB+, and that Ofcom allows this to happen. And if you look at the graph further down this page, the number of DAB+ receivers will very likely form the majority within the next 2-3 years, so the DRDB's suggestion would mean that current MP2 services might be switched off within the next 2-3 years. 

I don't think they're right about that, because even Ofcom wouldn't allow them to switch off MP2 services that soon, and instead I think the commercial radio groups will add new AAC+ stations in around 3 years' time alongside existing MP2 services. 

The commercial radio groups will basically add new DAB+ stations as soon as they think that launching them will allow them to make extra profit, so once there's, say, a couple of million DAB+ receivers in the market there's no way they'll ignore this opportunity to make more profit -- the commercial radio groups are quoted on the stock market, so they are literally duty-bound to make as much profit as they can for their shareholders, so if there is an opportunity to make extra profit they will do, albeit that they will wait until the dust settles on the issue of DAB+ and all the receivers in the shops will be DAB+ receivers (which won't take long to happen).

Ofcom's current position on DAB+

Here are quotes taken from Ofcom's current position regading DAB+ sent to me on Wednesday 21st March by Ofcom's media office (I've added bold for emphasis):

That, again, is completely at odds with what Quentin Howard said in his interview on Working Lunch, because he clearly tried to suggest that DAB+ would never be used in the UK, whereas Ofcom is only saying that there are no plans to switch at the moment -- massive difference.

Furthermore, when I spoke to the Head of Broadcast Technical Policy at Ofcom before Christmas and suggested to him that it is inevitable that the UK will switch to DAB+, he agreed.

And Ofcom's statement is -- as usual -- full of spin, because Ofcom is keen to avoid what the broadcasters and Ofcom have been referring to as a "crisis in consumer confidence" over DAB if the general public gets wind of DAB+ replacing DAB.

The only thing that this website has said that differs from what Ofcom says is simply that I ignore Ofcom's spin, and say what I think will actually happen, and a long explanation of what I think will happen is contained on this web page. The only thing I'd change from what I wrote on that web page in November last year is that I think I was being slightly optimistic to say that we can expect to see the first DAB+ stations launch in the UK in 2-3 years, and I'll change my estimate to 3 years from now.

DAB+ receivers in the shops by Q3 this year

According to Frontier-Silicon, which is the company that produces around 75% of all the DAB receiver modules that power DAB receivers, DAB+ receivers that will be software upgradeable to support DAB+ will go on sale in the shops in the UK in July, and they will finish implementing DAB+ by Q3 this year, so true DAB+ receivers (without requiring an upgrade) will be in the shops soon after that. 

Then, the proportion of DAB receivers that support DAB+ will steadily increase over the following year or so, and I would expect that the vast majority of all DAB receivers in the shops will support DAB+ by then. From then on it is simply a waiting game until there is a sufficient number of DAB+ receivers in the UK market before it becomes economically attractive for the commercial broadcasters to launch DAB+ stations using the new AAC+ audio codec. 

There seems to be some confusion over the cumulative DAB sales in the UK so far, with Quentin Howard suggesting that there's been 4.5m receivers sold in the UK but the BBC saying that 3.5m have been sold. Splitting the difference and saying there's 4m DAB radios in the market, when you consider that there are around 120m FM radio receivers of one kind or another in the UK (i.e. FM tuners as part of micro systems, hi-fi separate tuners, portable radios, portable CD stereos, personal radios/walkmen/MP3 players with radios, car stereos, clock radios), then 4m only represents 3.3% of all the radio receivers in the market.

The broadcasters want to switch off FM, and this will probably happen somewhere around 2017 - 2020. So clearly with DAB receivers only accounting for 3.3% of all radio receivers in the UK market then sales will have to accelerate rapidly from what they are today if they want to achieve a switchoff near the end of the next decade. But when sales become high the receivers being sold will be DAB+ receivers, so DAB+ receivers will inevitably form the vast majority of all "DAB" receivers within the next few years. This situation is summarised in the following graph, which uses the Digital Radio Development Bureau's (DRDB) estimates of future cumulative DAB sales up to 2009 (the DRDB hasn't estimated past 2009) and my own projections for the last 3 years based on sales accelerating at a constant rate -- and if sales don't rapidly accelerate then there's no way they will be able to switch off when they'd like to.

Ofcom is a light-touch regulator, which in its own words is "biased towards non-intervention" and "promotes self-regulation wherever possible", and judging by its actions over the last 5 years since DAB was properly launched, Ofcom -- and the Radio Authority before it -- has always done whatever the commercial broadcasters want it to do when it comes to technical or commercial decisions. The only exception to this rule that I can remember is when the interests of the commercial radio groups conflict, and Ofcom then arbitrates. Ofcom isn't a "regulator" in the way that the vast majority of people think of the word; Ofcom is an enabler for the commercial radio groups (Ofcom couldn't care less about the radio listeners -- because what the listeners want often doesn't concur with what the broadcasters want, and nothing gets in the way of helping the commercial radio groups), and if the commercial broadcasters want to use DAB+ then Ofcom will not stand in their way unless Ofcom really thinks that the broadcasters are seriously jumping the gun. 

And the simple truth is that -- despite what Quentin Howard might say -- the commercial broadcasters do want to use DAB+, because it will allow them to launch new stations. The reason why they want to launch new stations is because commercial radio revenues exploded in the 1990s due to the large increase in the number of commercial radio stations transmitting; and they see launching new stations on DAB as being a way to replicate the increase in revenue and profits they saw in the '90s.

Even the BBC wants Ofcom to consult about DAB+

The BBC said the following in its submission to an Ofcom consultation last year:

And Channel 4 wants to enter the radio business, and it is by far the favourite to win the licence for the 2nd national commercial DAB multiplex, and the following quote in C4's submission to the same Ofcom consultation last year leaves the reader in no doubt as to whether C4 would like to use AAC+ on the new national DAB multiplex:

Basically, if the UK doesn't use DAB+ I won't eat my hat, I'll eat my car.

Quentin Howard

If you're wondering who this Quentin Howard bloke is and what he does, well, as I say at the beginning, he's the President of the WorldDMB Forum, which is the organisation that markets DAB and T-DMB around the world and looks after the standards and so on, and he's the chief executive of Digital One, the UK's national commercial DAB multiplex operator. Thankfully for the world, I think his time as President of WorldDMB ends later this year.

Quentin Howard has been labelled, and I think he even labels himself, as being a "digital evangelist", and he kickstarted DAB in the UK when he invested £3m of Digital One's money in Imagination Technologies in 2001 so that they would design an integrated DAB receiver chip which would enable the first sub-£100 DAB radio -- which ended up being the Pure Evoke-1.

That may all sound very impressive, but unfortunately Quentin Howard's actions are what led to DAB being the way it is today, because even though the AAC audio codec had been standardised in 1997 and Reed-Solomon error correction coding is used on CD discs, so both of these technologies could have been used; and even though DAB sales in the UK were approximately almost zero in 2001 (there were probably literally less than 1,000 people that owned DAB in the UK in early 2001 because the cheapest DAB receiver was £800!), Quentin Howard stuck with the old MP2 audio codec and weak convolutional error correction coding which are the reasons why DAB is such a poor system.

Not only that, but the Evoke-1 and all other DAB receivers in 2002/3 could only receive DAB transmissions in Band III even though L-band could be used for DAB; so the UK was forced to squeeze all the stations that wanted to transmit on DAB into 4 multiplexes in Band III for most towns and cities and 5 multiplexes in London. 

Therefore, the current situation where the audio quality is dire because the MP2 bit rates are far lower than the bit rate levels required to provide good audio quality with the MP2 codec can be directly attributed to Quentin Howard's "engineering" decisions back in 2001.

Other consequences of sticking with MP2 are that, despite DAB offering more stations than on FM, less than 50% of all analogue stations are currently transmitting on DAB, and those that aren't transmitting either can't due to the ridiculously expensive transmission costs or because the multiplex in their area is already full. Again, both the very high transmission costs and the fact that multiplexes are full to bursting is also directly attributable to Quentin Howard sticking with the MP2 audio codec in 2001, because MP2 is extremely inefficient.

Basically, Quentin Howard was the right person to have been interviewed about DAB+ on Working Lunch, but his answer should have included the word "sorry", but unfortunately that word isn't in Quentin's vocabulary.

Quentin Howard on audio quality 

Below are a few quotes made by Quentin Howard in a presentation he made at the IBC technical conference in 2005 about the audio quality on DAB:

On the issue of reducing the bit rates of stereo stations from 128 kbps to 112 kbps on DAB:

On the subject of using dynamic range compression (also known as "audio processing") on classical music:

And on the subject of using audio codecs:

Audio codecs 101: if the effect of an audio codec is very noticeable then it's obviously being used at far too low a bit rate. 

Quentin Howard's views on audio quality are self-evident, and radio listeners are there for one purpose: to make Digital One and its parent company GCap Media profit.

And yet in spite of his views on audio quality, he's the President of the WorldDMB Forum, which is the organisation in charge of DAB, which is a system that was supposed to provide higher audio quality than on FM, but which fails to do that miserably. And largely due to Quentin Howard's technological decisions regarding the design of the DAB receiver chip as well as his influence on the way DAB in the UK has been implemented, in my opinion he is about the last person that should be the President of WorldDMB, and the sooner his reign ends the better it will be for all radio listeners who do or will listen to digital radio using the DAB standard. 

And yet this man even had the audacity to go on BBC television and call the audio quality on DAB "fantastic"!