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The Government of Norway announces
[April 16], the Ministry of Culture announced a national FM-switch off, to complete the transition to digital radio. Norway is making [a] historical move into a new radio era, being the first country in the world to decide upon an analogue switch-off for all major radio channels. With DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting) and digital radio, listeners will be provided with more radio channels and greater diversity in content.
[...]The DAB-coverage in Norway now exceeds FM-coverage. DAB provides Norway with 22 national channels, as opposed to five channels transmitting nationwide on FM.
[...]Switch-off starts in Nordland county 11th January 2017 and ends with the northernmost counties Troms and Finnmark [13th December] 2017.
Official announcement in Norwegian. Also covered at Ars Technica.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by isostatic on Tuesday April 21 2015, @05:41PM
The broadcasters killed dab in the UK by pushing out far too low a bitrate. This meant the technology was ridiculed and never caught on.
Of course DRM makes DAB look like DTT in comparison.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 21 2015, @06:24PM
I regularly use DAB in the the UK. Yes bit rate is low, but my experience is that you get better quality than FM. Although this is a slight apple to oranges situation as with FM you end up with audible white noise on the track where as with DAB you get digital compression artefacts. There is also alot more space for broadcast channels.
It probably is worth saying that I am not overly worried about audio quality as I mainly listen to talk radio and mostly from the BBC (R4/R5/R5SX). Most of my music comes from CD or the Internet and I will only occasionally listen to R6.
As for all or nothing, my experience of this is that its true, if the signal is losing slightly more than the ECC technology can handle then you have a horrible garbled noise (similar to the noise you get when you mpg123 at a directory containing cover art). If the signal is much to low then you really do get nothing. The other issue is that the covered areas are quite small and that rescanning in a new area takes a long period of time (maybe due to old hardware), this to me makes it not really practical for usage in cars. But then if you want to listen to Music why not use your own collection in the car.
For my purposes I think I would be happy with just AM (LW) and DAB. Yes FM sounds better than AM and is more robust than DAB. But as a medium point it does not really service my needs. Plus in a post apocalyptic situation I could build a LW receiver from things I find lying around, from memory ;-).
(Score: 2) by GungnirSniper on Tuesday April 21 2015, @06:48PM
Similar greediness hurt satellite radio in the US.
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(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday April 21 2015, @07:40PM
Was it really greed?
XM and Sirius were both going bankrupt until they merged.
They now have essentially a captured market, many receivers in the field in homes and cars, and a joint satellite platform. As of October 2012, there are nine satellites in orbit: four XM and five Sirius satellites. That shit is expensive. The prospect of any other players getting into this market is slim to none.
They now have a near monopoly, and have slowly been raising prices. But signal quality seems the same to me.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by GungnirSniper on Tuesday April 21 2015, @08:12PM
Greed isn't only a financial term. In this case their greed was stuffing as many channels as possible on their services, reducing the quality of the streams to do so.
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(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday April 21 2015, @09:33PM
Yet its the only differentiator of the product.
If all you want is "adult hot contemporary" unfortunately there are about three stations shoveling that locally.
If you want continuous techno then your only choice is buying a satellite HOWEVER the problem is every 0.1% of the listening audience wants a DIFFERENT weird corner.
The other (related) problem satellite has is their window has already passed. I can't find a place where I can't stream on my phone, assuming I'd want to (I'm more an audiobook/podcast guy). Its very hard to sell a piece of hardware and a monthly subscription when the competition is a free app on the cell phone the user already has.
Imagine for a minute what listening to unusual music was like, say, 25 years ago. So I'd order old fashioned optical disks of industrial music, kids, we called them CDs as in compact diskettes, and then I'd listen to these disks, only one album per disk, too. Crazy old person stuff. People will look at satellite radio the same way in just a few years, if they don't already. Like those people still paying for AOL in 2015.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday April 21 2015, @09:45PM
The other (related) problem satellite has is their window has already passed. I can't find a place where I can't stream on my phone
That's funny, because the only place I have sat radio is in my car precisely because of the long gaps in cell coverage in the Western US. There are parts of Oregon, Washington, Utah, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico and Arizona where data is not available, or drops down to GPRS speeds.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday April 21 2015, @09:58PM
Hmm good point I bet tunnels are interesting too. The stuff I listen to is downloaded, usually over wifi when the phones on a charger, so I don't care much, but some folks like to stream or like live sports or live shows. So that is a good point.
Still eventually, theoretically the whole world's gonna get wired up, every square foot, and its cheaper to plop a tower down in the desert than to launch a satellite.
From a purely financial standpoint those satellites aren't going to last forever and investors would be pretty crazy to launch another...
(Score: 2) by GungnirSniper on Tuesday April 21 2015, @11:30PM
They also sold themselves as commercial-free, and could have also sold on sound quality as well.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 22 2015, @06:17PM
CDs are old-fashioned? Get off my lawn!
Old-fashioned music came on vinyl or on magnetic tape in a compact cassette.