Tom Brew

It’s pretty obvious to see that mobile broadband is set to reach its tipping point any time now. As part of their respective upcoming digital dividends, many European countries are working together to clear complementary parts of their spectrum to make way for more mobile broadband type services. Once this happens, economies of scale will kick into action big time. Mobile internet devices will become cheaper to both manufacture and buy and roaming, in particular data roaming, across Europe will become much cheaper.

Couple this with a general consensus that telecommunications holds the key to dragging us out of this banking balls-up economic crisis and I would expect some serious innovation in terms of mobile broadband in the near future.

Now, I’ve started my own little trial of the capabilities of mobile broadband...ok so the trial consists of me buying an iPhone and ragging my monthly data limit but it’s a start.

I’m a big Last.fm fan, have been for a while now so it was the first app I installed on my iPhone. It’s just like radio but without adverts, annoying DJs and rubbish RnB. I listen to a lot of radio in the car and it got me thinking, wouldn’t it be good to be able to listen to Last FM in the car?

So I grabbed my iPod car FM transmittery thing (technical term) and gave it a go to and from work today - a sort of qualitative user-experience type of test. The result was pleasingly...pleasing:

The Manx Telecom 3G connection is fast enough (about 3Mbps I believe) to not frustrate you when buffering the first stream and subsequent tracks follow seamlessly. Sound quality is awesome because its streamed at 128kbps - it’s actually better sounding than my Radio 1 FM reception and there were no stutters, corruptions or re-bufferings. Of course, the app is easy to use and having the album art and band info displayed is just cool...if not a little distracting…

So, as mobile broadband, not just 3G but other evolutions such as LTE and WiMax, becomes more ubiquitous why couldn’t it mark the demise of traditional FM/LW radio etc as a “broadcast” platform? Just think of all the possibilities - high bandwidth, highly interactive, synchronous devices in every house, car, pocket. I’m sure radio shows as we know them now will continue, but they’ll be delivered be over IP rather than FM.

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