The majority of DAB radios on sale today will be able to receive
any of the digital broadcast standard proposed in the Government's
Digital Britain report, after a
firmware upgrade.
Digital Britain states that all FM stations move to DAB by the
end of 2015, leaving the 100MHz FM band free for 'ultra-local
radio', which will later also move to DAB.
Since the original MP2 encoding-based DAB standard was adopted
in the UK, DAB+ and other improved versions have been developed
that are four times more spectrum efficient than the UK's MP2
DAB.
These newer DABs have been adopted in many parts of the world,
and Digital Britain recommends these be considered for the 2015
switchover.
UK industry insiders have been split: some recommending a move
to enhanced DAB, others advocating staying with MP2 DAB to avoid
market disillusionment when expensively-purchased non-upgradable
DAB radios become obsolete.
In Digital Britain the government has mandated neither, and for
now left open the possibility that existing UK digital stations
could stay MP2 encoded, while stations moving up from FM could go
straight to DAB+.
Whichever way broadcasters go, many DAB radios on sale today are
firmware upgradeable to DAB+.
"All the IP [intellectual property] we have licensed in the last
two and a half years can support all of the Digital Britain
standards, and more," Imagination
Technologies
spokesman David Harold told EW.
Imagination develops the IP behind many of the world's digital
radio. It's customers include the chief suppliers of DAB modules
and chips to radio OEMs: Frontier Silicon and Future Waves.
Both of these firms supply Britain's biggest radio maker Pure
Digital, which has 30% of the total UK radio market, and is
coincidentally owned by Imagination Technologies.
"The majority of our current range is DAB+ upgradeable through a
PC," said Harold, adding that listeners need never know which type
of encoding is being used: "There is no reason you couldn't have a
contiguous station list for DAB and DAB+."
Strong criticism has previously been levelled at switchover
plans for two other reasons: the cost of DAB radios, and the high
power consumption of DAB decoders which has hampered the
introduction of battery-powered digital radios.
"These are the major goals in the industry: power consumption
and overall price," said Harold.
In particular, "our goal is the continuous reduction in power with
technologies including clock-gating and adopting more advanced
semiconductor process nodes", although, "exactly how far we will
get by 2015 is hard to say".