Why must our radios be switched off?

WE PASSED a quiet television milestone in Britain this week.

For the first time since the switch to digital TV was announced, high-street retailers have stopped stocking the old-fashioned analogue sets, for the simple reason that there is zero demand.

While some people doubtless remain irritated by the decision to switch off the old-style signal by 2012, the country largely sees the sense of it. Digital sets give you a better picture and more channels. Once you’re over the initial expense of replacing your old one, what’s not to like?

The position with radio could not be more different. Britain is also committed to switching off the FM radio signal by 2015, rendering obsolete the old sets that most of us still use. But there is no danger of high-street shops refusing to stock them because demand is still strong.

There are plenty of areas where the digital signal is at best indifferent, and even the keenest advocates of digital broadcasting concede that the quality is worse than analogue radio. In short, the situation is a shambles, and there had been hopes that a change of government might bring a change of policy.

But this morning culture minister Ed Vaizey will confirm that he wants to stick to the original target. This flies in the face of a warning from Lord Fowler, who chairs the House of Lords Communications Committee, at the weekend.

“There are people who do a lot of radio listening and if you’ve got four or five radios dotted around the house, replacing them means the cost adds up,” he said. “The public have got to be taken with the process on this otherwise there is going to be an explosion of indignation.”

The basic problem is that the system of digital radio that Britain has adopted, Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB), is not very good. When digital transmissions were first started by the BBC way back in 1990, DAB was the only option around. It was assumed that other countries would follow suit and the system would become universal.

But the rest of the world has not prioritised the digital switch in the way that Britain has. And in the meantime, two other systems have emerged that seem to work better, called DAB+ and Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM).

It’s as if we had opted for Betamax videos while the rest of the world was going for VHS – only, while many people argue that Betamax technology was actually the better of the two, DAB is widely agreed to be the poor relation.

“Originally they said it was going to be much better than FM but actually the quality is much worse,” says Matthew Linfoot, principal lecturer in radio at the University of Westminster. “If you try to get DAB in central London it cracks up, and my students can’t get it at their halls of residence in Northwest London. So it was supposed to provide much better access for all but actually it doesn’t.”

One of the main arguments for transferring to digital was that the FM airwaves are congested and stations currently have to fight for space. Digital undoubtedly allows more stations to be crammed in – but the management and infrastructure have turned out to be very expensive.

Industry sources estimate it costs about £1 million a year to put a station on to DAB – way out of reach of most commercial stations. The BBC has invested heavily in digital content and was the earliest adopter in Britain. It created the digital stations Radio 7, 1Xtra, 6 Music and the Asian Network, as well as various spin-offs to Radio 5 Live.

Some of these have built up loyal audiences: witness the vocal campaign to reprieve 6 Music when a newly cash-conscious management tried to axe it. And the commercial sector has found it even harder to make digital pay. It has also been cutting stations back rather than expanding.

“It’s a far cry from the television model where you put everything out on digital, you get new stations, people cheerfully adopt the technology and eventually analogue just becomes redundant and people don’t mind if it’s switched off,” says Linfoot.

“That seems to be working but in radio terms it hasn’t because the quality isn’t very good, it’s very expensive to produce and commercially it doesn’t seem to make sense.” It’s estimated that there are as many as 100 million analogue radios in Britain.

Unlike computers or mobile phones, which we are resigned to upgrading fairly often, we update our radios much less often. I’ve got two that I’ve had for between 10 and 15 years, and another battered one I inherited from my father. They are all variously the worse for wear: one of them is a mini-system that no longer plays CDs, while the waveband needle on my father’s old set no longer moves when you turn the dial.

Chucking them out wouldn’t be the end of the world – but for the moment they are fit for their limited purpose of supplying the news and The Archers. Naturally we all bridle at the prospect of replacing sets like these in one go – although the price has come down to about £20 for a basic DAB radio.

But a greater expense will be car radios. Around 20 per cent of all radio listening happens in cars but only one per cent of cars can receive digital stations. A replacement car radio costs around £300, while a conversion kit is more than £100.

If it seems odd that car manufacturers have not installed digital radios as standard, it comes back to the problem with the DAB format. The manufacturers only want to put one type of digital radio in their cars for all their markets but there are too many systems internationally so they won’t do it.

This, says Linfoot, has been a major setback. “If digital radios were in cars as standard and had been for the past 10 years, everyone would accept them as an inevitable development,” he says.

So why is the new Government going ahead with forcing us to use an inferior system that nobody wants? It may be a matter of money. In these straitened economic times it can raise cash by flogging off the vacant FM bands to mobile phone companies or the like.

That’s why it won’t continue with the current dual situation, where the public can choose between digital and analogue. A better option for ministers might be to abandon DAB and go for one of the better systems. But that would be galling for anyone who has already bought a DAB set.

Nobody denies that Vaizey has been passed a poisoned chalice by his New Labour predecessors but the Government has been warned, and it should not be surprised if it gets caught in Lord Fowler’s explosion of public indignation.