Try telling that to World Service management. In the same week that the Egyptian government shut down internet and mobile phone services, the World Service announced that 7 radio services (though admittedly not the Arabic service) will in future be available on the internet only.

Perhaps a word on my perspective. Here in New Zealand we are still holding off on digital broadcast as well as betting our business on internet listening.

I see the trap and didn’t intend suggesting we walk into it. The cards here are held until, probably, digital receivers become low cost, low power, easy to use and quite possibly integrated into other devices.

Agree, the claims of a 4G takeover of broadcasting will remain just that for quite some time. How much time our radios audience spends consuming broadcast content as opposed to IP delivered content is the debatable metric. Radio’s challenge is to create it, the engineering challenge to deliver it appropriately.

For analogy, we still do have a fax machine, although mostly it does printing, copying and scanning.

You’re falling into the trap of “something tech might come at some point in the future which might fix this so there’s nothing to worry about”, which is an easy fudge.

That doesn’t alter the fact that, as you acknowledge, bit-metering is not good for internet radio; and I’ve been in this game for long enough to cheerfully ignore “whizzy things might happen” comments until they actually do.

The all-you-can-eat plans are grandfathered. That is, lucky if you got one, but you can’t buy a new one.

BUT, fibre to the home is on it’s way. Soon the bandwidth to my home will be a hundred fold more and consequently much less per bit. I won’t give a shit if my radio streams are metered per bit or byte because the tariff will be tiny. I’ll be watching HD movies that download in real time.

The point is that we in countries lucky enough to have ubiquitous broadband of some kind are in a transition phase while the networks grow to a point that they can sustain all our bandwidth needs.

Case in point is 4G mobile, also on it’s way. Speeds of 500 to 1000 faster to your mobile than 3G within 5 years. But in the meantime before these new networks are built the network owners have to ensure the current networks remain usable for all.

I will accept that per bit metering can produce some undesirable behaviours for services like radio in the interim, but these are symptoms and shouldn’t distract us from the end game.