The true cost of DAB

摘要

Paul Eaton, who is Director of Radio at communications infrastructure company Arqiva, said recently that maintaining either a DAB network or an FM network costs about £100 million per year. Perhaps he should give us some indication of costs with international comparisons for FM. When you are a monopoly supplier it is all too easy to quote figures which have no basis and could suit your own drive for profits. FM is a cheap and mature transmission system which has worked well for years. DAB is newer and requires considerably more precision at very many more transmitter sites. It is useful to compare the current DAB national networks with the earlier ITV network. The BBC DAB single frequency network (SFN) recently reached a total of 185 transmitters with a highest Effective Radiated Power (ERP) of lOkW. The sum of the ERP of these transmitters is 606kW. Sensibly, within this total there are 27 transmitters at sites (or adjacent BBC sites) which were used for the main 40S line ITV high power transmitters which had a highest ERP of 475kW. The sum of the ERP of these 405 line TV transmitters was 3585kW. This is approximately six times the total ERP for DAB to date.