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Comment by illini1 | Hacker News Reader

FM radio has not been deprecated, where did you hear that? And the infrastructure is not disappearing any time soon.

Norway shut down FM in 2023. Switzerland will shut it down in 2026. Various other governments are choosing dates - it's clear it's going away soon.

Stupid question, but what do you listen to in the car without FM?

Surely playing music doesn’t require that you you connect your phone to your car?

All cars in Europe support DAB (digital radio) for the last ~5 years by law.

Pretty much all cars also support bluetooth, USB sticks, and some still have Aux in. Some support various internet radio/music (spotify etc). Most cars support Android Auto/Carplay, wired and wireless, giving you access to anything your phone supports.

All new cars. Buying new cars isn't as common in many places in Europe as it is in countries like the US.

According to https://www.acea.auto/figure/average-age-of-eu-vehicle-fleet..., the average age of a European car is over 12 years. It'll take another seven years for your average European car to have DAB+ support, let alone all cars.

In theory any old car can support DAB+ but car accessory manufacturers like to as ridiculous amount of money for car radios, so I doubt this change will occur faster than the car replacement rate.

DAB+ has been a complete failure so far. Its reception issues are even worse than FM and of the few people I know that have even heard of it, nobody cares. The benefactors of the DAB+ transition aren't the people listening tk the radio, but the radio stations fighting for frequency space.

if you think DAB a failure, then the "we" I meant is just unevenly distributed.

(norway and switzerland are both mountainous countries, which meant the same FM station had to maintain several different transmitters on numerous frequencies — if you're in a country flat enough to serve with vanilla sugar and hagelslag, might that have something to do with our divergent experiences?)

The average age of a Norwegian car is still 11 years (https://www.ssb.no/en/statbank/table/05528/tableViewLayout1/), not the five since DAB+ has been mandated. I don't know if Norway has a large car radio upgrading scene, but support is still far from guaranteed. Broadcasters may have switched away, but with the modern omnipresence of services like Spotify, I wouldn't be surprised if the cars not supporting DAB simply don't use their radio anymore. Based on the numbers I can find, 30% of Norwegian cars still can't receive DAB broadcasts and at the time of the switchover only a third of the cars on the road could even receive DAB transmissions. Percentages improve if you also count home radios (that's where the 97% number comes from) but it's a lot easier to install a new radio at home than it is to upgrade your car.

Furthermore, DAB transmits on an even higher frequency than FM, so mountainous areas will need more transmitters than with plain FM, not less. Sure, the combined digital streams DAB provides are used to reduce the amount of transmitter installations, but that also could've happened with FM.

DAB is far from a failure. It'll eventually replace FM by mandate, because there's an incentive for governments to let more radio stations pay for broadcasting licenses. However, it's also far from a success at the moment. Access to streaming services such a Spotify or the internet broadcasts of the radio stations themselves has probably eased the transition as well.

I haven't listened to FM, AM, DAB, or anything broadcast since I've been able to connect my phone to my car (20 years?).

Why would I listen to what the station programmers decide (and possibly riddled with ads) when I can configure my phone to play whatever I want when I want?

I’ve never used radio in my current car. Yes, I connect my phone to my car and, if I don’t have cell reception, plenty of music in my library. That’s probably pretty normal.

But Norway and Switzerland are two countries where I'd assume you don't see as many 20 year old cars as you do in the opposite parts of Europe. Many cars since the early 2000s don't have those standardized boxy stereos you could just swap anymore. You can make the point that people can just tune in through their phone but most people won't go through the hassle every time they sit in a (company owned, for example) car. I doubt FM is going away this decade, perhaps even longer, for most of the world. As for Europe, there's also Romania with their longwave AM broadcasts.

Norway still have local FM radios. It's just the big public and commercial stations which were forced to move to DAB. When that's said, I believe there are fewer and fewer local stations available.

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