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I’ve heard a lot about DAB over the past couple of years, and finally went out and brought one last week, so what’s all the fuss about?

DAB stands for Digitial Audio Broadcasting – which is a new technology released in the UK in order to eventually turn off FM radio stations. The new technology is already being used in a majority of countries in the EU and the wider world, however, a lot of countries are sceptical about its continued use, mainly due to it’s less than FM radio quality. It was heavily advertised to the public by the BBC corporation, along with many other organisations taking up DAB licenses, as they were considerably cheaper than FM radio licenses.

Most of the stations in the UK broadcast at 128kbps, which is at present around 1/2 the quality of the same level of FM transmission. There have been several new standards released which will be taken up by several of the countries currently using the old pre-2007 DAB standard. But having had a DAB radio for a little under 24 hours now, I can’t say that I have noticed any difference other than the sheer amount of stations. Whilst you can tell that the quality isn’t quite as good as FM, it is still reasonable, and if this results in more bandwidth being available to those smaller radio stations that might not have the ability or the financing to be able to supply a broadcast at the equivelant of FM (256kbps) then as long as consumers do not seem to be negatively effected, which considering the quality of the devices used to receive DAB are some of the highest quality, and of much better build quality than those that have just FM receivers, then the quality issues could be masked by the overall improvement in quality of receiving devices.

Many international development consultants have argued and will continue to argue about the legacy technology being used in the current range of DAB radios in the UK. Pre-MP3 encoding technology is used to encode the transmissions which has provided many providers with a moral dillema, as they still wish to provide the same level of service, but feel that at present they are restricted from doing this by the UK Government (OFCOM) and their current regulations. International radio stations that currently broadcast on FM have shown the slowest move over to DAB, although it is envisiged that before the Olympics are in London, the entire FM radio system will be turned off (According to a statement released by BERR in May 2009) In order to release the frequencies for use by the police and the military.

Overall there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of fuss surrounding DAB now in the UK, aside from those suppliers of the service who are annoyed that they are only perceived to be allowed to provide a 128kbps service instead of matching FM radio quality. DAB is set to become the standard in the UK over the next couple of years, and when that happens we will be further distancing ourselves from our european friends and further pushing ourselves into our own little world, which is something that at this time of global recession we cannot afford to be doing!