It is a thought that seems almost prophetic today when one looks at the phenomenon in India that is being called `the rebirth of radio.'

The sudden spurt of interest that followed the unshackling of local Frequency Modulation (FM) radio from government control and the way these new stations are attracting a new, young and mobile audience, is being seen as a new leap of technology in a medium that will be 100 years old in 2006.

Yet, along with the back-patting and the satisfied smirks, last week, a new sobering message was trickling down from the Broadcast Engineering Society's international conference on terrestrial and satellite broadcasting, `BES Expo 2006', held in the nation's capital.

Deployed in 40 countries

This was a reminder that a hot new technology was waiting in the wings — indeed, it had already been deployed in 40 countries, with over 1000 services on the air. It is called digital audio broadcast (DAB) or digital radio, a term which today includes digital mobile broadcast (DMB), that is, TV and multimedia. (There is a rival digital broadcast standard known as HD Radio, mostly used in the U.S.)

DAB identifies the generic technology of digital broadcasting, including the main standard that it follows (Eureka 147). It is promoted by a global non-governmental organization called the World DAB forum, which has its operational headquarters in the U.K.

In fact, the core technologies to move radio broadcast as we know it today, whether Amplitude Modulation (long wave, medium wave and short wave) and FM, from the analogue to the digital world, can be traced back to leading British research centres like Imperial College, London and the cluster of technology companies which has mushroomed around Cambridge University.

Not surprisingly the U.K. is well ahead on the road map of digital radio with 12 per cent of households accounting for 3 million digital radio receivers, which can listen to over 400 digital broadcast stations within the country.

Equally unsurprisingly, Singapore became the first country in Asia, to launch a digital radio initiative and currently has 14 stations on the island. China is conducting trials and plans to deploy digital radio using the DAB standard, in time for Beijing Olympics in 2008.

Korea which already has a lively digital broadcasting operation, has moved one notch up the value chain, and harnesses DMB to provide mobile TV from terrestrial as well as satellite platforms on a variety of portable devices.

The Korean broadcasting Commission is currently in India to demonstrate terrestrial DMB. Indian Government agencies, as well as private players like Bharti , Star TV , Zee TV and Tatas, are said to be associating with these trials; while All India Radio has an ongoing digital radio experiment in Delhi.

Backward compatibility

What does all this mean for the customers? At workshops organised in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore earlier this week, WorldDAB brought together experts from U.K., Singapore, Taiwan and Sweden to evangelise digital broadcasting and showcase their own offerings.

Nick Bank of Radioscape, U.K., explained that it was now possible to build backward compatibility with analogue broadcast systems into chips that fuelled DAB.

Hence the digital broadcast receivers on sale today, some of them as cheap as $50, can also receive conventionally broadcast LW, MW, SW and FM content.

Crystal clear reception

Lindsay Cornell, Principal System Architect with BBC Research explained that DAB over longer distances with foot prints comparable to short wave could be achieved with an extension known as Digital Radio Mondiale. While DAB was currently restricted to the 30 megahertz band, the new DRM standard, would push this to 120 megahertz.

One of the beauties of DAB is that it allows some tweaking to the audio band so that data at 50 kilobits per second can also be simultaneously broadcast.

That is why in addition to its crystal clear reception quality, digital radio receivers are also able to provide text-based station identification, programme guides and weather information or news snippets.

Interestingly, some of the most exciting developments in digital broadcast are happening in India.

The Bangalore-based Epigon, has created circuit modules which will enable the country's only digital satellite radio provider, WorldSpace to launch a terrestrial operation as and when it is licensed to do so.

Epigon's CEO Radhakishan Rao, explained that the company had also perfected a mobile TV solution based on the DAB standard.

In fact, explains Glenn Vandevoorde of Future Waves, Taiwan, terrestrial digital TV broadcasts are already being received on mobile phones, in many Pacific Rim countries and they may well represent the future of broadcasting, where a single digital standard will rule across radio and TV.

"India must embrace a digital future," says WorldDAB's Asia advisor, Jeff Astle, "Asia is already a hot bed of digital broadcast technologies."

Nobody expects today's FM and other analogue radio technologies to vanish overnight.

Even optimists give it another decade; but with so many countries already declaring a cut-off date for analogue TV, it is inevitable that radio too will soon have to count the days for a digital deadline.

The time to start, for India, could be here — and now.