DAB+ radio has much lower range and the signal is unstable.
To make matters maybe even worse, HAM radio operators at work inform me the DAB+ standard isn't going anywhere and that the development has mostly stopped. Maybe somehow 5G can do some marvels for the technology, time will tell.
AM had the nice property that it worked somewhat in mountainous areas, but it didn't sound very good. It had the nice property of range.
FM sounded better than AM but had to be more-or-less line-of-sight. It also had the nice property of range.
DAB+ is like an abandoned FOSS project that everyone jumped on like it was Zoom before naked dudes were jumping into online church services and online elementary school classes with zoombombing.
5G is boondoggle unrelated to radio for cellular connectivity that requires much more infrastructure since sub-mmw can't go through many materials at its higher frequencies. I swear it's a conspiracy (theory) to sell 50x more tower gear than 4G LTE. We already have gigabit 4G LTE, sub-mmw 5G just seems uneconomically undeployable at-scale.
Technologies shouldn't be adopted simply because they're new or being pushed by vendors. Heck, Apple doesn't even have any 5G phones because 5G may not survive once the major carriers wise-up.
I’m pretty sure the next generation of Apple phones (iPhone 12?) will be 5G compatible, when the current generation came out 5G was barely deployed (still isn’t in a lot of places). So that’s more a matter of timing than Apple not believing in the technology.
agree with your reasoning, not your conclusion.
I don't think there will be material 5G buildout by the end of 2020 (even before the Covid-19 crisis I didn't believe that). So unless there's an important market with significant 5G buildout (not sure anybody really has "significant" and certainly none of the important markets do) they'll continue to wait.
This is especially true as current 5G devices have larger physical size and abysmal battery life. Apple can't fix that problem on their own; part of the problem is build out and part of it will need to be solved through the experiences of the radio chip vendors and their current customers.
Compare this, say, to WiFi 6 which Apple already deploys in their 2019 iphone 11 and 2020 ipads. hat is a little ahead of the curve (chip sets are OK but there's little deployment yet). Wifi base station deployment will trickle out and until then there's no negative cost for Apple's users (i.e. no effect on battery nor size).
AM can sound better, but it requires people to buy new radios, and the whole point of AM is that it's cheap.
I had a Sony AM Stereo Walkman, and if the station was broadcasting in AM Stereo, the sound was considerably better. Not FM quality, but not too far off to my ears.
On the frequencies that 4G uses, 5G is a moderate upgrade. Somewhat better speed, notably better latency.
5G will also add more wifi-adjacent frequencies, only slightly higher than existing networks use, which sounds like a perfectly good idea to me in dense areas.
Digital compression simply doesn't cope with packet loss well enough to be practical. Even with a very weak FM signal, in emergencies you can still hear through the noise.
Now instead of getting a little static and being able to understand 100% of what is said and shown over the air; it's now 10% recognizable video 90% visual blocks, and 0% audio.
That said I think streaming might kill it anyway.
But with a digital signal, as long as you can distinguish individual bits, the picture is always perfect, so you can get away with a much lower signal strength.
I bet the increase in quality and maybe the reliability or support costs for the old analog equipment were bigger factors.
But radio is often received by moving receivers, for which there is no good solution, and analogue will always be better.
I mean, this is already how satellite (especially interplanetary satellite) communication works.
It's not digital compression that the important bit, but the error correcting code: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coding_theory
At least on FM, on AM it doesn't work well for me.
The worse part, to me, is that it takes quite a long time for the HD signal to lock in. I had a brand new rental car last month with a brand new HD radio in it. It took upwards of ten seconds for some of the HD signals to lock in.
Radio stations (AM and FM) can improve this by going all-digital, instead of the hybrid technology almost all are running right now. But doing so not only excludes hundreds of millions of older radios, it reduces the coverage area. It's simply not worth the revenue hit, since in radio coverage area is everything.
On the plus side, I had a great Sony HD tabletop radio that I loved dearly. It had an iPod dock on top and if a song came on the radio that you liked, you'd press a button and the track information would be stored in a special playlist the iPod.
Then the next time you plugged the iPod into iTunes, it would match the information from the playlist and you could buy the song you heard on the radio from iTunes. It worked really well. I wish something like that existed for satellite radio.
I've always wondered what full digital stations do, but for the reasons you've said I doubt there are any.
That makes the station both sound awful and be significantly less reliable for reception.
I have been trying to look up what this I-frame-less encoding method is called, but it's impossible to find niche topics like this on Google or DDG these days (tried intra sweep, iframeless, progressive intra, without iframes, etc).
A lucky few with cars old enough to have a standard DIN car stereo bracket simply popped out the FM radio and dropped in a DAB replacement.
But, essentially, radio listening in both car and home dropped off a cliff.
Edit: The Great FM Kill-Off was a double whammy as they simultaneously stopped broadcasting DAB using the MPEG2/L1 codex and switched to DAB+' HE-AAC.
This made sense, technologically - sound quality of low bitrate MPEG2 is not impressive - but the result was that most early adopters of DAB had to purchase new receivers yet again as early DAB sets did not support DAB+.
Further, leading up to the FM shutdown all the focus was on FM=>DAB, not DAB=>DAB+ - so during the switch, three of my four DAB radios went the way of the dodo bird without me even having realized it was going to happen. I wasn't very motivated to buy new receivers yet again...
My new car has DAB+ but it also has tunein and spotify built-in so that's a much better option.
FM isn't dead yet here in Norway though you can still listen to local stations via FM and it looks like the license for them will be extended to 2031.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-power_broadcasting#FM_radi...
It also uses a bit less power at the transmitter, but the receivers are more complex and need more power than FM receivers (afaik), which is a bad tradeoff.