Should we keep FM? DAB? Replace it with IP-based radio?

Jack Schofield, writ­ing in the Guardian Tech­nol­o­gy Blog (1 July 2009), urges us to “Put the boot into DAB, and try to Save FM”. I might just agree… but for a slight­ly dif­fer­ent rea­son. Here’s the com­ment I added to the article.

If we are keep­ing dig­i­tal radio in its present form, then it cer­tain­ly makes sense for us to upgrade from cur­rent DAB’s anti­quat­ed MP2 tech­nol­o­gy to DAB+/DMB‑A, which allow the use of mod­ern codecs and thus high­er qual­i­ty (cur­rent DAB sta­tions are abysmal com­pared to good FM) on a far small­er bandwidth.

Yes, of course the vast major­i­ty of exist­ing DAB radios will be obso­lete at some point, but they do not have an enor­mous­ly long life any­way, and we are all used to hard­ware going out of date in today’s world, aren’t we? It’s a fact of life. We get new gad­gets because we want to, and because they do so much more than the old ones: there isn’t time for them to become tech­ni­cal­ly obsolete.

How­ev­er, there is a real ques­tion in my mind whether we should­n’t sim­ply skip all that and go to an IP-based sys­tem for the “radio space”.

Radio in the UK is obvi­ous­ly extreme­ly pop­u­lar — pos­si­bly more pop­u­lar than ever, appar­ent­ly para­dox­i­cal­ly, But whether “the space occu­pied by radio”, to use Bill Thomp­son’s excel­lent phrase, has to be car­ried on a mul­ti­plex ter­res­tri­al broad­cast struc­ture for the fore­see­able future is anoth­er mat­ter, because car­ry­ing it via IP net­works would make more sense.

Inte­grat­ing the radio space into a nation­al net­work infra­struc­ture would make the cur­rent Band III and L‑Band spaces avail­able for oth­er ser­vices — but only if that IP-based infra­struc­ture exists. It would require true broad­band of the fibre-to-the-home vari­ety sup­plied on a uni­ver­sal ser­vice basis — one <i>single</i> net­work in which the instal­la­tion of cheap­er urban infra­struc­ture would sub­sidise the hard-to-reach rur­al envi­ron­ments — and would thus need to be laid down by a nation­al ser­vice provider (even if it sub­con­tracts instal­la­tion to exist­ing pri­vate companies).

An FTTH infra­struc­ture would be backed up by large-scale WiMax-style wire­less net­work pro­vi­sion to allow mobile lis­ten­ing to inter­net radio sta­tions and much more, includ­ing cov­er­age of real­ly dif­fi­cult areas.

Giv­en that, then of course you can have all kinds of ‘ultra-local’ ‘broad­cast­ers’ — but they could be heard all over the coun­try (and beyond). Giv­en sym­met­ri­cal broad­band we can all be con­tent providers, even if, like most blogs, the vast major­i­ty only have a tiny audi­ence. At the same time, the net­work can car­ry all exist­ing radio broad­cast­ers and you no longer need to think of the “air­waves” as a scarce resource to which only the priv­i­leged few can have access — “here comes everybody”.

If a true Dig­i­tal Britain were in our future, then a sen­si­ble approach would be to hang on to FM until it’s in place. But cop­per-based 2Mb/s is not what this requires.

Cov­er of the final Dig­i­tal Britain Report

I haven’t had the oppor­tu­ni­ty yet to read through the entire Dig­i­tal Britain report, but some­one who has is lead­ing tech jour­nal­ist Bill Thomp­son, with whom I worked on the Cam­bridge Dig­i­tal Britain Uncon­fer­ence that he organised.

Bil­l’s report, Engag­ing with the Inter­net, is well worth a read and cov­ers the top­ic admirably. And, nice to hear, it’s hope­ful rather than gloomy. Check it out.

The Dig­i­tal Britain Uncon­fer­ences Report is now avail­able. There’s an Exec­u­tive Sum­ma­ry and the full Report itself, and you can read them both below. Most impor­tant of all, assum­ing that you agree with the con­tent, I would encour­age you to put your name to the doc­u­ment by adding a com­ment on the web site with your full name.

The whole process by which this Report came togeth­er is almost as amaz­ing as the final doc­u­ment itself. Feb­ru­ary saw the release of the offi­cial inter­im Dig­i­tal Britain report and the Dig­i­tal Britain Sum­mit, both of which seemed to many to leave a great deal of ques­tions unan­swered and not go near­ly far enough. Com­ments were sought in advance of the release of the final offi­cial report lat­er in the year.

Giv­en vir­tu­al­ly no time, a groundswell of pop­u­lar activism around the coun­try led groups and “Uncon­fer­ences” to be set up to explore and col­lect com­ments to sub­mit for con­sid­er­a­tion, using all the lat­est inter­net tech­nolo­gies and social media sys­tems to organ­ise, pub­li­cise, and allow live par­tic­i­pa­tion in meet­ings all over the coun­try. From rooms full of peo­ple in some loca­tions to a hand­ful of par­tic­i­pants in anoth­er, we all came togeth­er and thrashed out our ideas for how Britain should move for­ward into a dig­i­tal future of uni­ver­sal high-speed sym­met­ri­cal Inter­net access in which we can all par­tic­i­pate. We all added our con­tri­bu­tions to what we felt “Dig­i­tal Britain” should real­ly mean.

Then came the remark­able efforts of a small team of edi­tors to col­late the reports from the indi­vid­ual meet­ings and bring them togeth­er to cre­ate the final Report and Sum­ma­ry. Every­one involved is to be hearti­ly con­grat­u­lat­ed for a tremen­dous job.

I was mild­ly (though hap­pi­ly) sur­prised that my per­son­al account of the Cam­bridge meet­ing end­ed up as the Cam­bridge group’s sub­mis­sion to the report. Inevitably I did­n’t cov­er every nuance of the dis­cus­sion, but I hope oth­er atten­dees feel that I pre­sent­ed it fair­ly and effec­tive­ly. My per­son­al thanks to Bill Thomp­son for con­ceiv­ing the Cam­bridge meet­ing and help­ing to bring the entire effort together.

Now the Dig­i­tal Britain Uncon­fer­ences Report is out there – and is being con­sid­ered by those prepar­ing the offi­cial Gov­ern­ment Dig­i­tal Britain report for pub­li­ca­tion in just a short time – and I am very hap­py to put my name to it. I would like to thank every­one who helped put the Uncon­fer­ences and the result­ing Report togeth­er, for all their hard work assem­bled in a remark­ably short time. I am very pleased to have been able to con­tribute a small part to the process.

I am more than hap­py to endorse the final Dig­i­tal Britain Uncon­fer­ences Report and the rec­om­men­da­tions con­tained there­in. I sin­cere­ly hope it pos­i­tive­ly impacts the Gov­ern­men­t’s plans and deci­sions in this vital­ly impor­tant aspect of the coun­try’s future.

Please read the report, or at least the sum­ma­ry, and if you agree with it and its rec­om­men­da­tions, please add your name to it in the Com­ments sec­tion by click­ing here.

Dig­i­tal Britain Uncon­fer­ences

Dig­i­tal Britain Uncon­fer­ences Report

Bill Thomp­son arranged a “Dig­i­tal Britain Uncon­fer­ence” in Cam­bridge on May 7th, which I attend­ed. It was a small affair, with a total of around half a dozen peo­ple involved over the course of the meet­ing. We observed that it being so easy to get to Lon­don, many peo­ple from the area would have gone to the Lon­don meet­ing at the ICA the night before.

Here are some mus­ings around what we dis­cussed. [The fol­low­ing became essen­tial­ly the bulk of the Cam­bridge con­tri­bu­tion to the Dig­i­tal Britain Uncon­fer­ence Report.]

We start­ed the gath­er­ing next to the lamp-post in the cen­tre of Park­er’s Piece in Cam­bridge and ulti­mate­ly adjourned to the Pic­ture­House café nearby.

On the agen­da were three main areas: which we iden­ti­fied as core con­cerns and restrict­ed our­selves essen­tial­ly to those areas: Infra­struc­ture, Broad­cast­ing and Rights.

We began by not­ing that we were aware that there was a dif­fer­ence between “blue sky” think­ing and what was actu­al­ly regard­ed as prac­ti­cal to achieve, but inevitably as we did adopt a fair­ly expan­sive view as far as infra­struc­ture is con­cerned, that fed over into oth­er areas of the discussion.

Infra­struc­ture

Both Bill and I have jour­nal­is­tic and broad­cast back­grounds (he being more accom­plished than I am) but one thing we have in com­mon is that we are in sev­er­al sens­es not only con­tent providers but also used to work­ing with con­tent providers. As a result it’s per­haps inevitable that we are going to assume (and I think right­ly) that if not every­one, then at least a great many more peo­ple than are cur­rent­ly able, would like to become con­tent providers them­selves, whether they want to pod­cast, video­cast or even run TV or radio chan­nels. All of that means that what­ev­er net­work infra­struc­ture we might see being made avail­able, it had to be sym­met­ri­cal: it had to have equal up- and down­load speeds.

And inevitably those speeds would want to be sub­stan­tial, espe­cial­ly if we want to do HDTV on demand, for exam­ple. We did not feel that the sug­gest­ed 2Mb/s uni­ver­sal broad­band ser­vice, deliv­ered by run­ning fibre to a cab­i­net at the end of the road and some­thing like nor­mal cop­per wire from there to the house, was suf­fi­cient, and favoured a solu­tion bring­ing fibre to the indi­vid­ual home or business.

There are like­ly to be some objec­tions to this. Fibre to the indi­vid­ual router is prob­a­bly ten times more expen­sive than run­ning it to the cab­i­net. Sym­met­ri­cal routers mean expen­sive high-speed trans­mit­ters. And in addi­tion, there’s an argu­ment that says that what is being done here is the equiv­a­lent of bring­ing basic mains water or elec­tric­i­ty sup­ply to the most remote parts of the UK. A col­league of mine points out that there is a vil­lage in South Wales that got mains elec­tric­i­ty after he got broad­band in his Cam­bridgeshire vil­lage. And any­way, what would every­one do with all that bandwidth?

We, I think, would take the view that if South Korea can aim high then so can we, and we real­ly ought to offer peo­ple some­thing in the order of 200Mb/s even if you or I can’t think of the things that oth­ers might want to do with it all…yet. Just as we can think of pos­si­bil­i­ties, so can oth­er peo­ple: we are a cre­ative lot in this coun­try. Look at how pop­u­lar inno­v­a­tive, sim­ple-to-use tech­nolo­gies like Audio­Boo, which enables peo­ple to record short audio seg­ments on their mobile phones and share them with the world, have caught on. Video­boo is on its way, and apps like this are just the begin­ning. Look out: “Here comes every­body”, to quote Clay Shirky.

It’s quite like­ly that some parts of the coun­try would sim­ply be impos­si­ble to access direct­ly with fibre. In some cas­es a point-to-point microwave link could be used to car­ry a data feed out to a remote vil­lage, for exam­ple, with land-based dis­tri­b­u­tion at the far end.

In addi­tion we would envis­age the estab­lish­ment of an exten­sive wire­less net­work, using WiMax or sim­i­lar tech­nol­o­gy. This would pro­vide high-speed mobile access, back­up in the case of a pick­axe through a cable, and dis­tri­b­u­tion with­in rur­al areas. Indeed, the idea would be that you could trav­el around the coun­try while lis­ten­ing to inter­net radio or even watch­ing a TV channel.

Broad­cast­ing

Which brings us on to broad­cast­ing. Bill Thomp­son used a phrase on BBC World Ser­vice’s Dig­i­tal Plan­et recent­ly which I think is very apt. He not­ed that what­ev­er dis­tri­b­u­tion medi­um was in use in the future, “the space occu­pied by radio” would always be there (indeed, despite all the oth­er options avail­able today, radio lis­ten­ing in the UK is at a 10-year high). And the space occu­pied by tele­vi­sion. And so on. If you have high-speed inter­net access all over the coun­try, at home or on the move, then you have obvi­at­ed the entire exist­ing broad­cast infra­struc­ture (and the cell­phone net­works, while we’re at it), but you have not obvi­at­ed the pro­vi­sion of con­tent — although the pos­si­bil­i­ties are imme­di­ate­ly a great deal broad­er. Not only can exist­ing broad­cast­ers be car­ried via the net­work but entire­ly new ones too — and increas­ing­ly, “broad­cast­ers” can be any­where on a con­tin­uüm from an indi­vid­ual to a large cor­po­ra­tion, and their lis­ten­ers can num­ber a hand­ful of friends or mil­lions across the world.

In addi­tion, the car­ry­ing of broad­cast­ing via the inter­net means that on the one hand the phys­i­cal lay­er that car­ries the net­work is imma­te­r­i­al (it’s what­ev­er gets the inter­net to the sub­scribers): it’s all the same kind of sig­nal; and on the oth­er, every com­mu­ni­ca­tions device you have will essen­tial­ly have the same front end: an IP-based com­mu­ni­ca­tion mod­ule. At the oth­er end it might look like a TV or a radio or a phone.

How’s it done?

It’s quite obvi­ous that a high-speed Nation­al Net­work Infra­struc­ture is not going to be built by pri­vate com­pa­nies on their own. Even with Gov­ern­ment sup­port it could be dif­fi­cult. Every­one would want to focus on the easy and thus prof­itable urban and inter-urban paths and nobody would be up for the rur­al areas. When the tele­phone sys­tem was installed, it was a nation­al pub­lic monop­oly. As a result, the prof­itable and easy urban rout­ings were able to sub­sidise the dif­fi­cult and thus expen­sive rur­al ones.

In the same way, the NNI should be a pub­licly-owned monop­oly so that such a sys­tem of easy sub­si­dis­ing dif­fi­cult can exist. Of course the project will involve sub­con­tract­ing to pri­vate cor­po­ra­tions, but the project would be man­aged and oper­at­ed on a nation­al basis. The NNI would be respon­si­ble for bring­ing the pipe into the house and main­tain­ing the ser­vice to that point; beyond that the user would install, or have installed, their own routers and oth­er equip­ment, and could employ spe­cial­ist providers to han­dle this along with main­te­nance and oth­er facilities.

An anal­o­gy I pre­sent­ed via the online link to the York­shire and Hum­ber­side DBUC a few days before was that the NNI is like Net­work Rail and the rest of us either run the trains or trav­el on them. Of course the anal­o­gy went down like a lead bal­loon, but you can eas­i­ly grasp what I am get­ting at. It should also be remem­bered that we had over 30 years of run­ning nation­al enter­pris­es, by and large suc­cess­ful­ly, under Gov­ern­ments of either colour and we would be bet­ter at it today than we were then: we know how to sub­di­vide and localise organ­i­sa­tions to max­imise their effi­cien­cy, for example.

In addi­tion, com­mu­ni­ty efforts could help reduce effec­tive costs, and — for exam­ple — sub­scribers could help make access eas­i­er as in this Nor­we­gian expe­ri­ence.

If peo­ple have direct access to the inter­net at high speed, what does an ISP do? Basi­cal­ly, the tra­di­tion­al role dis­ap­pears, and instead ISPs become “Inter­net Ser­vices Providers”, pro­vid­ing the web, email and data man­age­ment ser­vices that peo­ple can­not, or choose not to, oper­ate them­selves. In addi­tion, with the NNI’s respon­si­bil­i­ty end­ing at the doorstep, there would be plen­ty of room for inde­pen­dent con­trac­tors as well as larg­er organ­i­sa­tions to sup­ply, install, con­fig­ure and main­tain the routers and oth­er on-site infra­struc­ture required by sub­scribers to access the system.

How would it be paid for?

The sys­tem would be most eas­i­ly cov­ered by direct tax­a­tion, mak­ing the indi­vid­ual con­tri­bu­tion rel­a­tive­ly small. It seems that “spare” dig­i­tal switchover funds have already been spo­ken for at least twice so I would not expect those to be avail­able, and in any event, this is a rather larg­er project than 2Mb/s.

Dig­i­tal Rights

If we are going to let a mil­lion broad­cast­ers bloom and make it pos­si­ble to down­load an HD movie in a mat­ter of min­utes, peo­ple need to have the rights to han­dle copy­right mate­r­i­al legal­ly. The obvi­ous answer is a form of blan­ket licens­ing, where for an annu­al fee, you can do what you like. Aver­aged out over the online pop­u­la­tion this would be a rel­a­tive­ly small amount.

Dis­tri­b­u­tion ini­tial­ly could be via a “black box” sys­tem in which all the income goes into a fund which would be dis­trib­uted pro­por­tion­al­ly to artists etc in the same pro­por­tion as oth­er rights. How­ev­er there would be a cap, as with the Pub­lic Lend­ing Right, or a slid­ing scale, so the income for an extreme­ly pop­u­lar artist would lev­el off some­what, while still remain­ing sub­stan­tial. A fund would be set up, admin­is­tered by the roy­al­ty col­lec­tion soci­eties, to ear­mark a pro­por­tion of this income for devel­op­ing new talent.

If nec­es­sary a dis­tinc­tion could be made between con­sumers, cre­ators and dis­trib­u­tors of copy­right mate­r­i­al so, for exam­ple, there might be a blan­ket fee for enjoy­ing copy­right mate­r­i­al and an addi­tion­al fee for run­ning a music radio sta­tion. The prin­ci­ple should be to encour­age user-gen­er­at­ed con­tent and rely on the fact that lots of peo­ple pay­ing a small amount will prob­a­bly gen­er­ate a great deal more mon­ey than a few pay­ing a lot.

In the long term a “black box” sys­tem would become unwork­able as the roy­al­ties gen­er­at­ed by NNI usage would become the most sig­nif­i­cant source, and thus there would be no ref­er­ence against which to dis­trib­ute them pro­por­tion­al­ly. At this point there would be the need to intro­duce an auto­mat­ic log­ging sys­tem in which each media usage was record­ed and used to cal­cu­late roy­al­ty payments.

Regard­ing copy­right in more gen­er­al terms, the prin­ci­ple should be estab­lished that no pub­lic-domain work should ever be tak­en out of the pub­lic domain: changes of copy­right leg­is­la­tion could not be retroac­tive as a mat­ter of principle.

And that about rounds up my thoughts fol­low­ing the Dig­i­tal Britain Cam­bridge Uncon­fer­ence Part 1. Thanks to Bill for organ­is­ing the event and to Ellie and the oth­ers who dropped in for a chat dur­ing this infor­mal meeting.