And you think that would stop this government from culling it?
It's worse than that. We're getting into Ofcom's territory here. And I've never experienced a more incompetent bunch of batsrads. They make the government look competent and squeaky clean.
but the TV change is definitely coming in 2012, and i still can't get my 86 year old mum to use the digital remote!!
The difference being that digital TV has brought significant benefits to the consumer. Better picture quality, on the whole, more channels, a handful of which are actually watchable, the possibility of some HD'ish content, decent DPG functionality so you don't have to go through the pain of teletext just to see what's on next, etc...
Give the consumer enough carrots and they'll switch over happily.
DAB (as implemented in the UK) is already obsolete, so many of the DAB sets already sold will have to be binned sooner or later. It gives worse sound quality than analogue FM, before you try to cram in more channels. DAB+ might give you more channels per unit bandwidth with today's poor sound quality but at the expense of compatibility with the earlier DAB sets.
Even if you give the customer more channels, someone has to provide content, and airtime on DAB is expensive so they are all bailing out.
Meanwhile, anywhere there's an internet connection you can listen to practically any radio station in the world at DAB or better levels of sound quality using a PC or Wi-Fi radio. Any "digital radio" I buy will be going down this route, not DAB.
.. Which just leaves car audio. Cars have a lifetime of 15 years or so, so DAB can take over 15 years after cars are being equipped 100% with DAB radios from new. When will that be?
DAB was rushed out in the UK based on a promise that it would relinquish bandwidth that OFCOM could make a fortune out of selling. Had we taken a more considered approach we might have spotted the fact that it's a white elephant and that the last bandwidth selloff left a lot of fingers burnt, so the silly bidding is unlikely to be repeated - especially at 100MHz where it's not that useful for cellular networks.
Kevin