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Re: NANP ten digit dialing, was Goodbye to copper? [Telecom]

Wes Leatherock asks,

snipped-for-privacy@panix.com >writes: > > I am not sure what you're referring to here. Is this a television > > set or an IBOC radio? > >A television set. I am not familiar with "an IBOC radio". Another of >those techie terms like in the manual for my new digital TV.

IBOC stands for "in band on channel", and is the digital radio broadcating system used in the US. It is marked as "HD Radio" (for hybrid digital, not that other HD) and is licensed from Ibiquity, a CBS-affiliated company. It uses compressed digital streams on subcarriers via the regular AM or FM transmitter.

Digital audio broadcasting has been rather a flop in the UK, where it uses its own frequencies. IBOC (HDR) is not selling all that well in the US either, but the same radios do receive analog broadcasts, AM and FM, too. I don't know why so few HD radios are on the market; perhaps the license fee is too high.

***** Moderator's Note *****

In relation to telecom, I wonder if digital radio sales are flat because music players are being integrated into cell phone/PDA devices?

Reply to
Fred Goldstein
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News to me. The UK is often cited as one of the few countries in which digital radio actually has significant market penetration. (I don't know, however, how much of the market is listening via DVB-T digital-television receivers versus actual Eureka-147.)

Actually, it's probably more to do with a lack of demand on the consumer side, and power consumption on the device-maker side. There still aren't usable battery-powered, portable HD tuners in stores.

The one market that seems to be doing very well with the iBiquity system is public radio. They received grants from NTIA to upgrade their transmission facilities, and NPR's "Tomorrow Radio" project led the drive for "multicast" facilities. In many communities where there is only one public radio station, this makes it possible for the broadcasters to provide multiple streams of programming, and the existing $100-200 radios make a good high-value pledge premium. Since commercial classical has almost completely disappeared, multicasting allows pubcasters to serve that wealthy niche audience without compromising their more popular news and talk programs.

-GAWollman

Reply to
Garrett Wollman

DAB here is a more or less unique flavour of digital radio, and UK is not a big enough market to make it standard in important types of equipment - like radios fitted in cars.

The gov/ment just issued a report produced by the spectrum regulator) which talks about switching off FM radio by 2015 if they reach "50% penetration" for DAB.

The big con job here is that this is measured as "percent of households with a DAB capable set", not proportion of radios used for listening to DAB, by hours / users / sets etc - which is a massively lower proportion (maybe 2 to 5% depending on who you think of as giving accurate numbers).

This is despite a drift by commercial radio away from DAB recently, back to FM.

Lots of propaganda about DAB being better - apart from coverage, power efficiency / battery life, flexibility, cost of equipment and sound quality (what were those advantages again?).

Finally the rest of Europe has settled on a more recent standard which isnt backward compatible - so we keep an orphaned expensive technology, or go back to square one (but at least we dont have that many DAB sets to make obsolete if we do it now).

UK radio is dominated by BBC and most stations are on FM as well as DAB.

However sit in a DAB equipped car outside TV Centre (the biggest BBC site in the UK) and you can get radio on FM, but not DAB......

Reply to
Stephen

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