Internet radio is like driving in the Alps; an almost infinite amount of options possibilities and exiting roads to explore, all paved beautifully. A real pleasure for real drivers.

DAB is like a British Motorway; It gets you from your normal A to your regular B but you have no variety and very few options. They are full to capacity with no room for more lanes.

A real music fan wouldn listen via the internet. For the amazing choice and the superior audio quality. A couple of buffer stops really is worth it.
However, If you are more interested in the speech you might choose DAB… you don’t wonna miss the punch line!

Location is still the biggest factor. I can’t Imagine anyone sensible wanting an internet radio their car at this time. You’d end up either smashing up the radio or smashing up your car.

This statement is pretty much the same as saying that, rather than driving a reliable hatchback down an empty road to work every day, you would rather drive a race car along a toll road prone to traffic jams, continually pulling over to cool down or refuel.

Despite your incessant declamations, tenuous comparisons and tortured calculations, DAB works well enough and is enjoyed by millions. Radio is not — and never has been — hifi. To any real radio fan, your idea that interruptions to broadcasts are preferable to a barely-noticeable infidelity is, frankly, preposterous. And well worth repeating for amusement.

It wasn’t fun. First off, I discovered that the nearest cell to my house is GPRS only and is on a BIG hill, so I had to wait until I was out of range of that before I could even try to get anything streaming. After the phone locked onto an Edge-equipped cell I did get WPLJ up and running for a minute or so before I went up another hill and the phone locked back onto another GPRS cell. Silence. Arrrgh.

A bit further on, the Edge cell came back on and the sounds of New York flooded in once again. By this time I was nearing the twinkling metropolis of Gateshead and ’3G’ appeared on the iPhone. Wahey. I got to enjoy a whole 80 seconds of Lite FM in Miami’s Breakfast Show before the 3G disappeared and we were back to GPRS and silence was again golden.

And then I was at work.

The thing is that during the whole 21 mile journey my phone never dropped off the cell network (BMW give you a nice signal strength display when the phone is paired with the car) so voice calls would have been good to go from beginning to end. Clearly the handoff from one cell to another is the killer, with so many cells still being non-3G. In the space of a mile, you can go from 3G to Edge to GPRS and back to 3G.

I think listening to Elvis Duran on the way to work is still a way off, for me at least. A pity, because the wunder radio app on the iPhone serves you up virtually every radio station (that streams) on the planet and I have to admit that the 80 seconds of Lite FM in Miami that I did catch, the end of spot, a traffic bully and intro into a song, live halfway round the globe in my car in Gateshead was pretty darned cool!

RE: ‘when you have a radio station, or TV channel that is being provided live, simultaneously and synchronously to millions of people using the restricted resource of radio frequencies, it’s (TCP/IP) not the correct solution.’

I understand the Maths but could a form of Multicasting not help with the high demand streams?

Another non technical / Philosophical thought…

In my CAR I listen to FM/AM
At home, in my room I listen to my Flow via WiFi
Downstairs I’ll put on Last.fm
On the street I might listen to shoutcast on my iphone 3G
At my friends I’ll listen via Freeview or DSat
In Wales, on my bike I take my little DAB with me
and at work I’ll be making programmes and listening back to the mistakes on iplayer!

I guess what I’m saying Is that I quite like the variety of life, dealing with what I have at the place and welcoming the influance. I like feeling different in the car to at home. So I enjoy the freedom of not having everything everywhere. How would we ever discover a new beer if our favourite was at every pub and in every fridge!?

I forgot to say anything about the issue of people paying a monthly sub to listen to Internet radio – and I agree, I don’t think they would, especially not if it’s $15 per month. That’s a worse business model than WorldSpace.

I disagree with what you say about the sound quality, though, because there were over 4,000 Shoutcast stations using 128k MP3 or higher the last time I looked, so I’d bet most of them sound better than DAB, and a lot of them will sound better than the more mediocre FM stations as well. GCap/Global’s 128k WMA streams sound better than DAB as well. There are undeniably lots of low quality Internet stations, but the way I look at it is that there’s so many Internet stations that the poor quality ones are easy to avoid.

Good point about my use of averages – thinking about it, the most appropriate average would be the median, but unfortunately I don’t know what that is. To be fair, though, 30 mins to/from work commuting every day is 5 hours per week, and 21% of 20 hours is about 4 hours, so it’s not all that far off. I’ll try and remember to use 5 hours per week to calculate the costs in future on my website, anyway.

Re radio remaining free: I have said previously in this thread that I do think that radio needs its own dedicated broadcast platform, because I agree that it should remain free, and people shouldn’t be expected to pay an ISP to get it. My massive complaint, though, is simply that the DRWG wants to stop the public being told about Internet radio. I also think that if we’re going to use DAB/DAB+ as the main platform, we need to upgrade DAB+ now in time for FM being swithced off, or IMO DAB+ will be little better than DAB by the time FM is switched off.

Re data: I did some Googling about this a few months ago, and mobile data overtook voice last year apparently (can’t remember which network said this), and the head of Google Mobile (or whatever his job title was) reckoned that Google will eventually have more searches placed via mobile than from computers, although he didn’t say how long it would be before that would happen.

I’ve heard grumblings about mobile broadband speeds as well. It sounds like it’s taken off quicker than they were expecting.

Thanks for the tip and I appriciate there are podcasts available but I want to listen to the music as well…

A while back, a techy friend of mine, had what amounted to a PC in the boot of his car with a touch screen up front. every time he would pull up in his drive, the car would sync via wifi with his home PC. goes to show the extremes people are prepared to go to, to have the content they want, when and where they want it.

Don’t forget that Adam and Joe is also podcasted, which may be more convenient that real time dubbing off a Listen Again/Live stream.

It’s an incredibly frustrating experience. Streams come through in low quality. They disconnect frequently. The connection to the 3G network itself is not particularly robust, either. Having to redial is a pain. Initialising a connection can take 10-20 seconds.

I’ve not used a portable DAB radio, on surface public transport, for a couple of year. It, too, was not without its limitations (with respect to quality of service). It did, crucially, provide a better listening experience than HSDPA-3G (or FM). The odd bit of gurgle was preferable to no programme, chopping and changing between stereo and mono, hiss, and sibilance.

I generally listen to non-live content on an iPod these days, relying on my telephone’s FM radio for any perishable live content (such as the PM programme). It’s easier and more reliable.

Looking forward, I as a user want a seamless experience. I want to start consuming yesterdays Simon Mayo programme from 5 Live at home on my TV, pause it, pick it up from that point seamlessly on my iPhone and take it into my car then do the same at my desk in work.

To me, this would be truly mobile. If we solve the issue of seamless mobile data, will we be equipped to say, offer this sort of highly personalised iPlayer experience?

And if I’m spending $400 on a car radio, I probably want it to sound as good as FM (or even DAB). I might be a little forgiving since I’m listening to radio from somewhere else in the world.

You must always be very careful with averages however. The mean number of hours listened to per week might be 20 hours, but the reality is that a lot of people are listening for perhaps half an hour in the morning and half an hour in the afternoon as they commute, while another group of people drive for a living and spend hours a day.

It’s not a symmetrical listening curve. The very fine Radio 4 series, More or Less, talked about this very subject this week with respect to average wages.

The other major reason why broadcast must continue to be an important part of the mix is because from the BBC’s point of view, their services must be free at the point of reception, and requiring internet subscriptions or data packages are problemmatical.

Anyway, I don’t want to stray into those areas, as they’re not really relevant to the practical aspects of streaming audio via IP on the move which is what this post is really all about. It’d be fascinating to hear from a telecoms company about how their network is being used.

I recently attended a launch of a new phone on the 3 network, and during the presentation, we were shown charts that show that the vast growth in data on that network. Sadly I didn’t get copies of them, but putting this in proportion to speech would be interesting.

Capacity is already a problem in some areas anyway: talk to someone who commutes on a train along a route where many fellow passengers are using USB dongles with their laptops. I’m told that contention is so bad as to make the experience awful – and that’s along a route where phone companies are surely putting capacity in as fast as they’re able.

To be honest, I don’t think $400 is all that bad for the world’s first Internet radio car stereo – very early adopter type devices are always very highly priced, such as the first DAB tuner costing £800 (which the BBC kindly broke in 2001 when they slashed their bit rates).

I thought I’d already said on here how much the equivalent costs are, but I can’t find it. Anyway, for a typical radio listener in the UK that listens for 20 hours per week, and 21% of all listening is done in the car, and for a 3 GB mobile broadband package costing £10/month, I work out that if you listen to 64 kbps streams you download 524 MB/month, which is the equivalent of £1.75/month, or double the MB and cost for 128 kbps streams.

At the end of the day, most people will still listen via FM a lot anyway, which would bring the amount downloaded down a lot. And it’s included in teh cost of mobile broadband anyway, so it’s not actually additional cost for people who already subscribe to mobile broadband – so long as they don’t use their entire download allowance every month.

Might I respectfully remind you that this discussion is about internet radio in cars. Happy to publish whatever you wish to say about that, but I will remove off-topic discussion. It’s my website, you’re my guest.

You’re more than welcome to re-publish relevant conspiracy theories as long as they’re on-topic. Trails on telly promoting DAB, or the BBC’s alleged platform-bias, really isn’t on-topic for a discussion about mobile internet radio.

Although you don’t say as much, in common with other BBC (digital) radio employees, it isn’t exactly difficult to figure that your allegiances lie with DAB, and that presumably you fully support the DRWG wanting to kill off Internet radio at birth so that the BBC can carry out its protectionist agenda. Am I right?

If so, could you explain to me how forcing everyone onto DAB by only advertising DAB on TV and by deliberately withholding information about Internet radio by not advertising it, is (a) platform-neutral, which because of the unique way the BBC is funded, that’s what the BBC is supposed to be, but in practice they’re only platform-neutral when it suits them, and (b) how this is in the best interests of the people who pay for the BBC (and pay for your wages I might add), the licence-fee payers??

And to be perfectly honest, I’d prefer to put up with a bit of buffering on the live BBC Internet streams than listen to the dire audio quality on DAB anyway. That’s assuming that the live BBC Internet streams do ever provide what I’d class as being good audio quality, because that seems to be up in the air at the moment.

I’m typing this from a coach on the M6 travelling from London to Manchester. (Due to the unique way the BBC funds me the nice quick train wasn’t an option this time).

I am sat on my Macbook connected to 3G with a Three USB Mobile dongle. I am listening to the BBC National Mux on a Pure 1500. The BBC Mux hasn’t skipped a beat since leaving London. I have had seamless reception (I haven’t bothered checking Digital One as there is no content I’m interested in on it, but we can safely say its coverage is higher than that of the BBC’s).

By comparison I have been kicked off 3G by Three every 30 minutes or so, having to reconnect. Browsing speed is acceptable, however as we pull up to the barriers of the M6 Toll I have yet been unable to connect to a live stream of a BBC Network, whether it be by Realplayer or the new Coyopa streams. Therefore my headphones have been plugged back into the DAB walkman.

Clearly Mobile Internet (of whatever form) has to go a long way further than this to provide a seamless (or even working) listening experience.

UPDATE: I am now streaming one of our 64k Windows Media streams quite acceptably, however each time I get booted off the connection, I’m back into rebuffering and missing content.

(These are my views and not those of my employer, etc)

http://www.smh.com.au/news/digital-life/home-entertainment/articles/internet-car-radio-a-world-first/2009/01/07/1231004091554.html

(Entertainingly, the article above is from the Sydney Morning Herald – which ties in nicely with the photo above.)

Anyway, the car radio effectively connects to your phone via Bluetooth from whence it gets a 3G signal.

According to Blaupunkt “a 2GB monthly data plan would be required to power the internet radio for a month on the average drive to and from work.” Quite how long that “average drive” might be isn’t made clear.

There is a $400 fee for the radio plus $15 a month for – well – a Reciva type service I guess. The telecoms companies can probably rest easy worrying about the networks with those two costs alone.

A stand to visit at CES James?

Still waiting for iplayer on the apple tv by the way!

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-8472812-details/Battle+of+the+djs/article.do and http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/about_today/default.stm

“Wogan’s weekly ratings recently hit an all-time high of 7.9million, while Moyles’s inherited figures from Sara Cox have dipped below six million.” and ” just over six million listeners”

So, just for BBC Radio 1 and 2, there are 20 million listeners.

And we want good sound quality, say 128kbps.

20,000,000 x 128kbps = 2560000000 kbps or 2560000000 Mbps or 2441.40625Gbps or 2.38Tbps.

Or, using DAB it’s 4x128kbps which is 0.5 Mbps.

Now, call me old fashioned, but I would prefer to deliver this content using a broadcast platform, as it is easier to manage 0.5 Mbps than 2.38Tbps.

I haven’t heard that any networks other than O2 don’t allow you to stream audio/video via 3G/mobile broadband – and presumably O2 does allow iPhone users to stream, because the iPlayer is available on teh iPhone, plus there are Internet radio apps available for it as well.

One thign to bear in mind with mobile broadband is that it’s basically at the same stage as fixed-line broadband was in about 2001, when the speeds were 512 kbps. Mobile broadband currently uses the HSDPA standard. That’s going to be upgraded at some point to a higher speed version. Then there’s 3G LTE, which is classed as “4G”, which has max theoretical download speeds of over 300 Mbps – we won’t get 300 Mbps, but compare it to HSDPA’s max download speed of 14 Mbps, it’s a massive increase. Then after that there’s 5G, and the Japanese mobile operator NTT DoCoMo demo’d its 5G prototype system last year or the year before transmitting at 5 Gbps to a mobile receiver.

These headline speed increases are accompanied by equivalent increases in spectral efficiency, which means that the cost per Mbps for the mobile networks falls. So the value-for-money of mobile broadband is going to get far better than it is today, and in future we’ll be able to stream audio and video via mobile broadband in exactly the same way as we do via fixed-line today without worrying about how much data is being downloaded. At the end of the day, the mobile networks want to steal customers from fixed-line broadband, so they’ll be competing with the ISPs as well as competing with the other mobile networks.