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".