In its interim report, the Government's Digital Radio Working Group (DRWG) proposes that all medium wave and many FM broadcasts be moved to DAB in the next 15 to 20 years.

Has it gone mad?

With a congested radio spectrum, the Working Group wants to stick with ancient MP2 encoding when the AAC+ encoding behind DAB+ offers six times the audio capacity per MHz, at the same or better quality, and the same or better robustness.

The Report Interim report for the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport - recognises the superiority of DAB+ and suggests it for the far "totally digital" future, but continues: "We believe that, at least for the foreseeable future, the UK market must adopt DAB as the main digital radio broadcast platform. Explaining: "The UK DAB market is well developed and we believe it is not sensible, at this stage, to switch to technologies which are not compatible with the more than 7 million DAB sets already sold."

But for 15 to 20 years?

Right now the UK consumer has few problems buying TVs with 'HD ready' understanding that they are getting a TV that will cope with something new in the future.

The UK's Frontier Silicon and RadioScape supply most of the world's DAB radio makers with receiver modules, and can easily add DAB+ decode making their customer's products 'DAB+ ready'. The report calls for this, and they will anyway as Germany amongst others is going for DAB+.

The key to UK consumer acceptance is that existing DAB radio stations must stay DAB, which they will have to anyway if the DRWG proposal is accepted as it is.

Only stations shifted from medium wave and FM should go to DAB+ for the "foreseeable" future.

That way existing DAB radio owners can't feel cheated, and new users can purchase with confidence.

Thankfully, this is only the interim report.

Lets hope DRWG sees sense before the final version.