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Broadcasting has traditionally been seen as a way to distribute radio and television. Some has seen it as the only way to do so. But the industry is changing the views on what can be distributed, how it can be distributed and why a combination of various distribution technologies is the way forward. The EBU’s (European Broadcasting Union) annual conference on digital radio will in 2011 focus on how digital radio, mobile TV and the internet can be combined in order to reach out to more people with more programmes and with more possibilities for dialogue, interaction and additional services that make the radio stations and TV channels even more relevant, enjoyable and spot on. The conference programme is not finalized yet, but speakers from around Europe will contribute to a conference which will show broadcasters, telecom operators, devicemanufacturers, network providers, politicians and beurocrats how to look outside the box. One of the keynote speakers is Mr. Roger Solheim who is the State Secretary of The Norwegian Ministry of Culture. He will go in detail of why The Government of Norway has decided to switch off FM in 2017. He will also explain why going digital means many more radio stations for everyone across the mountainous country and cover the added possibilities for interactivity, on-demand programmes and additional services. A range of other speakers with insight of the broadcasting industry will share thoughts and ideas in Brussels. The event will take place in the European Parliament on October 11-12. Do watch this space for updates on the agenda.

Whenever you have a problem, there will always be someone claiming that a solution will solve the problem in the near future. For digital radio and mobile TV, the so-called solution that is often being referred to is called DVB T2. I have argued that this is an immature standard without available receivers, that it will be very costly to build such a network and that current DVB-T networks will have to be replanned and possibly rebuilt. In other words, not the way to go. DVB T2 as the solution for digital radio and mobile TV is just another biased claim made by false prophets. The solution is already here. It is called Eureka 147, more commonly known as DMB/DAB/DAB+. It is being used in over 40 countries around the globe, and over 500 million people will be covered by such signals by the end of the year. Germany is only the last country to launch such services, something that will happen through a soft launch in four days and officially one month later. DVB T2 is not the way to go. It’s not here now and may never be here in a form that will prove useful. And telecom networks won’t do the trick either, as I have repeatedly covered earlier. Radio futurologist James Cridland has written a piece looking at DVB T2-Lite. He claims that there are numerous issues with DVB T2 and that DMB/DAB/DAB+ is the way to go, not least due to it’s flexibility which opens up for digital radio, mobile TV, additional services (i.e. live traffic information and interactivity) and a combination with the internet. Cridland’s post is well worth a read: DVB-T2-Lite – a case of the BBC reinventing the wheel?

Taking a long distance taxi in Egypt can be very cheap. At least if you are Egyptian or you can haggle reasonably well. I recently took a taxi from El Salloum (on the Egyptian side of the Libyan border) to Alexandria, a distance of 510 kilometers. That set me back 350 Egyptian pounds (59 USD), from a random taxi I encountered just after passing customs. I must say that was remarkably cheap, even for Egypt. It is, after all a 5-6 hour drive. During my visit to Egypt I also took long distance taxis two other times (from Sharm el Sheikh to Dahab and back again, 90 kilometers each direction), paying 250 from the airport in Sharm and 150 back again (these places are much more touristy than El Salloum, hence a much higher price per kilometer – although I may have also been ripped off in Sharm or been very lucky in El Salloum). However, all three times I was introduced to what I ended up calling ‘the Egyptian switch.’ After getting into the car, the driver naturally starts driving towards the destination. But he (I have still not seen any female taxi drivers in Egypt) is always on the lookout for another car going to the same destination. In Egypt you can tell which city cars are registered in by the license plate, something that give the drivers a clue. If your driver sees someone that is likely to be going to your destination, he let the car pass and the uses his horn, waves out the window and/or flashes his lights. The car that just passed will in many cases stop and your driver will jump out and walk over to the other car. A minute later, you are ordered over into the other car and will continue to your agreed destination. The Egyptian switch explained 1) You agree on a price to your destination with a taxi driver. 2) The taxi ride starts. 3) The taxi driver will scout for other drivers going to the same destination and eventually stop someone. 4) Your driver will ask whether the driver of the other car (and this can be any car, not necessarily a taxi) can take you to your destination against some money. 5) If this is OK, your driver will negotiate a sum of money as compensation for the trouble. Of course, he will usually keep most (at least half) himself, then offer the remaining fare that you have agreed to pay for the trip to the new driver. The new driver will not know how much you have paid. 6) You will pay your original driver what you have agreed upon and then change vehicles. 7) The original driver will give some of your money to the new driver. 8) You will continue your journey to your destination, but in a new vehicle and with a new driver. 9) You will arrive at your destination and will not have to pay any more money. The money issue has already been sorted out between the drivers. Do note that your second driver may ask you (given that you can actually communicate) how much you paid originally. You may want to keep quiet about this, as likelihood is that the new driver will realize that he has received much less than what you have paid. This may be especially annoying to the new driver if the Egyptian switch happens at an early stage of the trip. This may actually be a good thing Why can this be a good thing? It is certainly environmentally friendly. The first driver can turn around again early during the trip and will not have to make an unnecessary trip. It is a little like car pooling and it saves petrol. It also divides the money you are paying to more people. Chances are high (or almost certain) that you have been overcharged (petrol only costs around 40 cents per litre in Egypt), so the money goes further and contributes with income to more families. You may also meet someone who actually knows your destinations, something that can be helpful when on vacation. And in all three cases that I experienced this, the new vehicle was much nicer than the first one. The downside of the Egyptian switch is that your journey is slightly interrupted and that you may feel uncomfortable by being taken from the middle of nowhere by an unknown driver. You can always refuse to go into a new vehicle if you don’t like the new car or the new driver. After all you have agreed a price and a destination with driver number 1. But you may have luck with driver number 2. Two of the three times I ended up with a new driver that spoke much better English than the first one. And vacation is about experiencing something new, so why not go for it. A natural question is, can the Egyptian switch inspire or be parallelled by i.e. an internet service? Can we do things smarter online?

If you are looking for a certain place, i.e. a park, in a new town, likelihood is that you wil ask someone you meet on the street where you should go to get there. Say that the person, let’s call her Sahara, would give you different answers based on your appearance, clothing or presumed interests. If Sahara thought you looked fit, she may tell you a longer route than she would tell an overweight person as she figured you would be up for the extra excercise (or she might do the opposite to help the heavier person burn some calories). If she recognized your clothing as expensive, she might tell you to go to the posh restaurant on the opposite side of the park instead of to the more interesting sculptures on the other side. Or if you were carrying a backpack she’d rather send you to the cheap but dodgy hostel nearby the park. After all, it should be straight forward. You are asking how to get to the park. Why can’t she just tell you, and everyone else that asks, the one and only fastest way to the entrance? Well, Sahara acts just like an increasingly number of websites, including Google, Facebook, Bing and Yahoo. They automatically personalize the info you get to see based on your behaviour. And they don’t ask whether you like this practice or not, they just do it because they think that they are helping. Just like Sahara did, although she was just guessing. The websites do actually know a lot about your previous surfing behaviour. Some people would say that they are indeed helping. Eli Pariser would not, as he tells The Independent newspaper. – The technology that was used to target ads is now being used to target content. It’s one thing being shown products you might be interested in, but when that’s shaping what information you see, it has a much broader effect. My main concerns are that it gives individuals a distorted view of the world because they don’t know this filtering is happening or on what basis it’s happening, and therefore they don’t know what they’re not seeing. It’s a problem, more broadly, for democracy because it’s like auto-propaganda. It indoctrinates us with our own beliefs and makes it less likely that we’ll run into opposing viewpoints or ideas. The Independent didn’t decide to talk to him for no reason. He has written a book about the issue: ‘The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You.’ Personalization More and more websites try to help you by giving you information that they believe you’ll be interested in. They call it personalization. I’d say this can be a very bad thing in many settings. It may certainly benefit you to hear about the kind of films that certain of your friends have recommended or commented on as you “always” like the same films as they do. But what happens to your own opinions if everything you are being served is shaped by someone else to an even greater degree than before? Films may be an innocent example. How about when it comes to news, politics or other more serious issues?Neutrality is lost, and you are influenced more strongly than before based on previous behaviour and what your friends on Facebook or Twitter say or do. You can certainly argue that this filtering is already happening. After all, people buy our watch certain newspapers and TV programmes based on their preferences. But two persons buying the same paper will at least be presented the same information in the same manner and in the same order. With the Internet, this is no longer necessarily the case. This is, if nothing else, something that is worth being aware of. You may furthermore not want to base your information gathering and opinion shaping exclusively on the internet. Because what comes up there may be very biased indeed. You are not a sheep, don’t act like one. Not even if Sahara tells you to. ‘The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You’ by Eli Pariser was published by Viking in Britain earlier this week.

Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation NRK’s Hurtigruten project which shows the voyage from Bergen to Kirkenes, an almost 6 day long live TV documentary from a postal/passenger/cruise ship, has drawn attention world wide. I have recently covered the unique combination of two screens (one for television, one for the internet). NRK’s web statistics show visitors from 176 countries. That is amazing! Click here or read on to see which countries were not interested. Not surprisingly, the top ten list of web users by country is as follows: 1. Norway (57,9% of the users) 2. Denmark (7,5%) 3. USA (6,5%) 4. Germany (3,6%) 5. Great Britain (3,5%) 6. France (2,9%) 7. Netherlands (2,5%) 8. Sweden (2,5%) 9. Canada (1,2%) 10. Russland (0,9%) All of these countries have, of various reasons, close connections to Norway. They account for 89% of the total. But the remaining 11% spread out to another 166 countries. And the real question is: Which countries were not at all interested? (And why?) There are 192 UN countries in the world (193 from July 9 when Southern Sudan becomes independent). I also count the Vatican, Kosovo, Palestine, Western Sahara and Taiwan as countries, totalling 197 (soon 198). That leaves only 21 countries from where no one watched the greatest sea journey in the world. North Korea goes without saying, unless Kim Jong-Il himself (aka. “Supreme Leader“) suddenly took interest himself (only the top leadership in the country has access to the internet). With North Korea as a given, 20 remain. Before continuing to the answer (link below), please feel free to guess as a comment below. My guess of 20 countries is as follows (and I still haven’t seen the answer): Bhutan, Central African Republic, China (a wild guess, but nrk.no is blocked there following the Nobel Peace Prize 2010), Comoros, Congo Brazzaville, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Iran, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Myanmar, Nauru, Samoa, Sao Tome and Principe, Somalia, Tonga, Turkmenistan, Tuvalu, Western Sahara. Click here for the answer I have now checked the statistics, and I was wrong on some of them. How about you? Please feel free to comment below on your suggestions. And find the answer here.

Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation NRK reported that 176 countries visited their web site to follow Hurtigruten. My big question was, from which countries did no one visit nrk.no/hurtigruten to watch the stunning scenery of the Norwegian coast? It turned out that the list of 176 contains some “wannabe countries,” at least according to my definition of countries (192 UN countries + the Vatican, Kosovo, Palestine, Western Sahara and Taiwan, totalling 197 (Southern Sudan will be added as number 198 on July 9)). Some, in this case, means 28. These are “wannabe countries,” meaning that they belong to another independent country or they’re just own IP ranges. The real number of countries from which people have been following “Hurtigruten” is in other words 148. Still a hell of a lot, and extremelly impressive. NRK has with this truly multimedial project really put down the foundation for a new genre. The 28 countries that shouldn’t, in my opinion, be counted as countries are, as follows: 28 wannabes Aruba (Dutch) Bermuda (British) BQ (dunno where this is, own IP, at least) British Virgin Islands (British) Cayman Islands (British) CW (unknown, own IP) Faeroe Islands (Danish) French Guyana (French) French Polynesia (French) GG (not me, but a cool name for a “country…” – own IP) Gibraltar (British) Greenland (Dansih) Guadeloupe (French) Guam (American) Hong Kong (Chinese) IM (unknown, own IP) JE (unknown, own IP) Macau (Chinese) Martinique (French) New Caldonia (French) Norfolk Island (Australian) Other Europe (who knows…) Puerto Rico (American) Reserved (well…) Reunion (French) St. Pierre and Miquelon (French) SX (unknown, own IP) Turks and Caicos Islands (British) The 49 that were left behind 197 countries minus 176 countries equals 21. 21 plus 28 equals 49. That means that 49 “real” countries have been unlucky enough to not have any viewers of “Hurtigruten, minute by minute” to tell the tale to the rest. Those countries are: Antigua and Barbuda Benin Bhutan Burkina Faso Burundi Cape Verde Cantral African Republic Chad Comoros Congo Brazzaville Cote d’Ivoire Djibouti Equatorial Guinea Eritrea Gabon Grenada Guinea Haiti Kiribati Kosovo Lesotho Liberia Libya Maldives Marshall Islands Micronesia Mongolia Nauru North Korea Palau Papua New Guinea Rwanda Samoa Sao Tome and Principe Seychelles Sierra Leone Solomon Islands Somalia Swaziland Timor-Leste (East Timor) Togo Tonga Turkmenistan Tuvalu Vanuatu The Vatican Western Sahara Yemen Zambia In other words, mainly countries from Africa and the Pacific with a few Asian and North American ones thrown in. Plus Kosovo and the Vatican (probably covered by the IPs of Serbia and Italy). Perhaps not really surprising given the lack of infrastructure, lack of Norwegian tourists and lack of interest in local media. The top ten countries? Read about them here.

Norway’s five and a half day long Coastal Voyage is broadcast live minute by minute on Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation NRK’s national TV channel NRK2 and being streamed 24/7 on the website nrk.no/hurtigruten. It is one of the world’s longest, and slowest moving, live broadcast ever. But quite possibly also the most beautiful. What started as a crazy idea turned into a crazy multimedial concept on TV and the internet. But crazy is good. Norwegians love it. The first weekend, almost 2.6 million people tuned in to NRK2 to watch parts of the voyage. That is more than half the population of Norway (almost 5 million). And many thousands more followed the journey via web TV. 46% of those were watching the streamed journey from outside Norway. NRKs Head of Research, Mr. Kristian Tolonen, breaks the numbers down a little. 180,000 people have, on average, been watching 24/7 since the start last Thursday. The peak was on Sunday evening, 15 minutes before midnight, when 692,000 was watching M/S Nordnorge (M/S NorthernNorway) enter the fjord of Trollfjorden, one of the highlights of the journey. Thousands and thousands of people wave at the ship from the shore, other boats, bridges, piers and mountains. Many of the spectators are also shown in close up on national television, something quite a few realise after being told so via mobile phones by television viewers at home. Their typical reaction? Double speeded waving. Two screens Judging by comments on Twitter, Facebook and nrk.no/hurtigruten, a lot of people are watching the journey on TV while communicating with others via the web. People are praising NRK, the license funded broadcaster, for daring to do such a thing. And many are saying that they are now happy to pay the license fee. That is not usually uttered loudly by many. My guess is that the number of people paying the license fee wil increase quite a bit the next days and weeks. Around 10% do currently not pay. The fact that the programme, if we can call it such, is so long and slow moving with continuous spectacular views, cheering people, orchestras playing and choires singing in every port makes it ideal for dialogue. This is a social experience, perfect for two screens. People are watching their beloved coast together on broadcasted television, and they have a need to share and discuss these moments, often in quite personal ways, via the internet. Whether it is with friends or strangers does not seem to matter. The official Facebook group of the voyage has over 47,000 fans, whereas several of the destinations have “trended” on Twitter. The concept is intriguing, extremelly fascinating and highly addictive. Some people claim to have watched 72 hours without sleep, others sleep on the sofa in front of the television set to miss as little as possible. This journey seems to make Norwegians extremelly proud of their country. There are dozens of Tweets and Facebook messages from people sharing that they are crying due to the strong emotion. Others proclaim this to be the best TV, or anti TV as some people call it, that they have EVER watched (usually followed by a number of exclamation marks). It may very well be the start of a different genre of programming, unless this is something that only appeals to Norwegians. It is about watching together, knowing that everyone else is sharing and taking part in a social setting which involves the sharing of impressions. Only broadcast television can make people come together like this. But not without the help of social media. Combination is key. And it ain’t over yet. You can follow the journey live on nrk.no/hurtigruten until Wednesday morning, June 22, Norwegian time.

Telenor, Norway’s biggest telecom operator is struggling to deliver the capacity needed by their share of the 5 million people in the country. They are simply put out of capacity. Or to use their own words: – We have a capacity challenge, Ragnar Kårhus, CEO of Telenor Norway said at a press conference today. The press conference came after the second network failure in a week. Last week, the telecom network of Norway’s biggest telecom operator was down for 12-18 hours in most of Norway. An embarrased mobile network operator voluntarily decided not to charge the 18 million USD they should have made from disgruntled customers the three next days following their little crisis. And then the network went down again today. Not as severely, but nevertheless. Are they experiencing a Friday curse? 3 billion American dollars The three days of lost revenues amounted, according to themselves, to 18,1 million USD. This was during a weekend and a bank holiday when traffic is lower than during a normal day. 6 million USD a day still means 2,2 billion USD per year in revenues, probably closer to 3 billion given that usage is higher on weekdays. Not bad for the 5500 transmitters needed to cover Norway. Telenor do not know for sure what really caused the problem, but being out of capacity is something that they should get used to. Internet traffic more than doubles every year. They are no longer encouraging data hungry services such as mobile TV, and they are moving away from all you can eat plans. But is that enough when more and more people are getting their first smart phone and 3G enabled tablet? Most experts predict that mobile TV and mobile video will generate most of the data traffic in the years to come. I have heard figures that mobile TV and video will account for everything from 50% to 91% of all data traffic. How about relieving the networks and providing a better and more reliable service to all customers by porting all national live TV and radio to digital broadcasting technologies? How about starting to sell mobile phones with such technologies built in (as they do in Korea and Japan)? In Norway and over 40 countries on 5 continents, that means built in DMB/DAB/DAB+, in the US we’re talking ATSC M/H and HD Radio while China boasts CMMB for mobile TV and DAB/DAB+ for digital radio. Emergency proof? With heavy data usage taking it’s toll on networks, what can we do in case of emergencies? Even on every New Years Eve we see that text messages take hours to get through to recipents due to a widespread habit of sending happy new year messages to each other. What if there is an emergency and everyone needs to be notified? A telecom network will go down. A broadcasting network will not. And broadcasting networks can also be used to send messages and even maps or detailed instructions. To everyone. Simultaneously and instantly. Without the risk of going out of capacity or being taken down due to heavy usage. That is something to consider in these times of increasing reoccurences of natural disasters and terror. Broadcasting and the internet make each other better. But when will Telenor understand that? Maybe not until governments will tell them that they have to.

I travel a lot. Often by airplanes. That puts me at the receiving end of a fair amount of jokes regarding pollution. Planes pollute a lot, is the mantra. So does the internet. According to the Vancouver Sun, each web search cause between 1 and 10 grams of carbon to enter the athmosphere. Perhaps not a lot on its own, but through billions and billions of searches, facebook updates, page impressions, video streams and sent emails a day, that adds up. The internet now uses between 2 and 3 percent of the world’s electricity, the same as the aviation industry. Planes do not pollute more just because you can actually see the exhaust on the sky. Luckily both the IT and the aviation industry spend a lot of resources on improvements in order to become greener. Of course, this doesn’t let me off the hook. I fly a lot and I use the Internet a lot, making me a double perpetrator. I have even used the internet while flying, but at least I didn’t have a beef sandwich in the air. Meat production is worse than flying and the internet combined. It accounts for almost a fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions.

The BBC writes that the number of internet connected devices will explode to over 15 billion, twice the worlds population, by 2015. They point to research done by Cisco which believes that television and video services will continue to dominate internet traffic, and that one million minutes of video will be watched every second. That is a hell of a lot of data. Let’s say that the average bandwidth is 2000Kbps. Many will prefer HD quality at a 4-6Mbps, others will have to settle for much worse video quality at a lower bandwidth due to less bandwidths being available from their ISP. An average bandwidth of 2000Kbps is not taken out of the blue. Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) has the most popular web TV service in Norway. Their average streamed bandwidth per user is 2500Kbps, although the internet were in for some trouble at the web tv player’s record breaking moment, with average bandwidths going down to 1500Kbps. One million minutes at 2000Kbps is almost 14 Terrabyte of data every second. Or 111Tbps (Terabit per second). Slightly higher than my internet connection at home. If added up, that means 1.15 Exabyte per day, or 420 Exabyte per year. Cisco’s calculations are however based on an average bandwidth of around half at 1024Kbps. We are in that case looking at 215EB per year. Exawhat? One Exabyte is the same as one quintillion bytes. As if that helps anyone’s understanding of it. I’ll leave explanations to Wikipedia. The bottom line is that an Exabyte is an enorumous amount of data. 215 or 420 of it in almost unimagninable. Cisco is naturally worried about how to be able to deliver infrastructure that can cope with such vast amounts of data. “The most important question we face is how to manage all this traffic intelligently,” Suraj Shetty, the company’s vice president for global marketing tells the BBC. One obvious answer is to use broadcasting technologies for all live radio and TV content. In combination with traditional internet services, obviously. That means that many of the 15 billion internet connected devices out there should have a chipset that also supports broadcasting. Is that going to happen? Intel jumps on the broadcasting bandwagon Well, a week ago, the worlds biggest processor and chipset manufacturer Intel, aquired SiPort, a company that specializes in broadcasting chipsets. SiPort writes the following on their webpage: “Digital radio is poised to become an important ingredient for handsets and other mobile devices as broadcast radio transitions from analog to digital. Intel’s acquisition of SiPort enhances our abilities to continue as the leading provider of low power, single-chip CMOS solutions enabling wide spread adoption of broadcast digital radio. SiPort’s digital radio expertise and solutions will leverage Intel’s market and technology leadership to provide best-in-class digital radio solutions.” SiPort produces chipsets for the broadcasting technologies of HD Radio (used in the US) and DMB/DAB/DAB+ which is used in over 40 countries on five continents. The internet is already struggling at peak times, something that the entire industry knows and understands. Some of the biggest players out there is now pointing to broadcasting as one solution to load unnecessary traffic off the infrastructure, optimizing it’s usage for everything else out there on the internet. More and more people are starting to understand that combination is key. That is good news to all of us that cherish the services and possibilities given to us by the internet.

How can we best utilize frequencies or bandwidth? The top trick is to get rid of double distribution. Why distribute the same signals twice? If we stop doing such, we will make those frequencies and that bandwidth available to others. Most industrial countries have realized this when it comes to television. They switched off the analogue signals and replaced them with digital ones. Norway is doing the same for radio in 2017. Other countries will follow also when it comes to radio. But the examples of analogue and digital television and radio are not the only relevant ones. We are also seeing a lot of double distribution divided between broadcasting and the Internet. Some people, usually titled consultants, think that the Internet will be able to take over for broadcasting. This is a wrong, misunderstood and distorted view. Why? First or bust The final of ESC (Eurovision Song Contest) gathers hundreds of millions of million simultaneous viewers. Very few of those viewers would have been satisfied if they had to watch a recorded version of the events after it went on air live. Sports and news are other examples of such events or programmes, where a recorded version in most cases just won’t do. Just think of the Super Bowl, British royal weddings and the Olympics. Premieres of popular TV programmes also make people want to watch it when it first airs, although they can be equally enjoyed later (but being first or doing something first is something people often strive for, as exemplified through the lines outside cinemas when the newest Star Wars or Harry Potter movie premieres or outside shops when a new iPhone launches. Even with giant TV successes such as ESC, the latest update on the bin Laden killing or the World Cup final an estimated 30-40 per cent of television viewers watch channels showing other programmes. You can’t find the event which virtually everyone watching television wants to watch. Maybe except for the moon landing. To upgrade the Internet to be able to handle such volumes of viewers may never be realistically possible speaking from a technical point of view. (There is also a range of other reasons why the Internet should not be the only distribution channel of live TV and radio.) Broadcasting will in other words always (at least in many, many years to come) be needed to technically distribute huge televised events. That leaves a natural question. Why even bother to upgrade the Internet infrastructure to be able to handle such volumes? To make it capable of managing peak times (if peak times are defined as being able to deliver television to everyone) is costly and not necessary. Bandwith explosion even without TV and radio After all, the Internet even struggles at times to deliver properly on normal surfing. And that is before we have even seen any major cloud computing efforts. Eventually billions of stationary and mobile devices will be depending on each other and centralized servers in order to deliver services. That means a lot of extra data. And that data increase comes in addition to the increased surfing in the population. And they won’t start surfing less data hungry services anytime soon. I am not saying that people should be banned from watching television live via the Internet. People should be able to enjoy their favourites from their preferred device. But broadcasting will always handle the majority of such distribution, let us rather expand and enhance the Internet so that it can do those things it is created to do, only better. That will also mean that the Internet can deliver live television to more people, but should it? Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) pushed it to the limits during the World Skiing Championship earlier this year, compromising those people out there that want, need and depend on the Internet for other purposes. Greed may be good, but for live television and radio, solidarity is what we need.

The government in Norway has decided that FM will be switched off in 2017. But what does that mean for the radio coverage in road tunnels? Norway has over 1,200 tunnels, 500 of which are longer than 500 meters. 180 of those tunnels do currently have FM coverage for NRK P1, some also carry P4, the biggest commercial radio station. 30 tunnels do currently have DAB coverage. By 2017 the 180 tunnels now covered by FM will need to be covered by DAB. The Norwegian Road Authority does however have a bigger goal in mind. By 2020, all the 500 tunnels of more than 500 meters in length will be covered by DAB/DAB+ and possibly also by DMB. Why is The Road Authority so keen on DAB? Because DAB doubles as an emergency system. In case of a car crash, accident, fire or similar the operator who follows the tunnels through video cameras will override all radio stations inside the tunnel and read out potentially life saving instructions to drivers and passengers. If the receivers also have a screen, additional info such as maps showing the nearest exit or the the nearest emergency phone can be shown. Where is this stated? The Norwegian Road Authority has published a manual on Road Tunnels, Manual 021E. The English version was published in 2004. There is a revised version from 2010 with some minor updates, although this version is only available in Norwegian. The manual is very detailed and is considered so well written that it is also being used by several American states for road tunnels and by the Norwegian Railroad Authority for railway tunnels. The relevant chapters are 602.3 Radio equipment, 602.31 Communication equipment and 602.32 Broadcasting equipment with “interruption facilities.” The regulations stated in such an official manual have been made are part of the law and must be fulfilled. That means that Norway’s many long tunnels will be safer than before. The emergency system does however require that the radio (or DMB player) is actually turned on with the volume on (it cannot turn the radio on for you). Information encouraging drivers to keep their receivers on should therefore ideally be posted outside all long tunnels. It is not known if such road signs will be put up. The Norwegian Road Authority is required by the EU (even though Norway’s not a member) to have such an emergency system in place, but The Norwegian Road Authority has imposed tougher rules on themselves than what is being required. The EU directive calls for such emergency system in tunnels above 1,000 meters of length, not 500. Norway does, in other words, not only do what the EU requires them to, but even more for the sake of safety. The EU directive? DIRECTIVE 2004/54/EC OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 29 April 2004 on minimum safety requirements for tunnels in the Trans-European Road Network. Chapter 2.16 deals directly with what has been covered here: 2.16. Communication systems 2.16.1. Radio re-broadcasting equipment for emergency service use shall be installed in all tunnels longer than 1 000 m with a traffic volume higher than 2 000 vehicles per lane. 2.16.2. Where there is a control centre, it must be possible to interrupt radio re-broadcasting of channels intended for tunnel users, if available, in order to give emergency messages.