I’m destroying radio

[Tom Wells]

Last Friday, while I was driving from Omaha to Chicago, I thought I'd try to stream WFMU from my laptop onto the the car radio.
I stopped at a rest area, hooked everything up, started the stream and began driving again. This was in Iowa.
It sort of worked. There was no "handing off" from one cell site to another, or enough failures of this that I had to spend considerable time
waiting for data, restarting the connection, REMOVING the cellular access card, and restarting the application, etc.
While this works on the 20 'city miles' I drive to work, it's not ready ready for the interstates.

The other problem was the feeling of being cut off from live radio while driving.
I actually wondered what the temp was.

Lower bitrate streams seemed to have less dropping and buffering, but the deficient sound was evident even over the noise inside
my ancient noisy car and noisy rear axle bearing (fixed that yesterday).

I don't see this suddenly getting better. The cellphone (also AT&T) showed good signal, but not enough to give a decent data rate
for streaming audio. Cellular data to computers isn't anywhere close enough to take a swipe at radio yet, at least out in the corn.

 

[DashRiprock]

Last Friday, while I was driving from Omaha to Chicago, I thought I'd try to stream WFMU from my laptop onto the the car radio.
I stopped at a rest area, hooked everything up, started the stream and began driving again. This was in Iowa.
It sort of worked. There was no "handing off" from one cell site to another, or enough failures of this that I had to spend considerable time
waiting for data, restarting the connection, REMOVING the cellular access card, and restarting the application, etc.
While this works on the 20 'city miles' I drive to work, it's not ready ready for the interstates.

The other problem was the feeling of being cut off from live radio while driving.
I actually wondered what the temp was.

Lower bitrate streams seemed to have less dropping and buffering, but the deficient sound was evident even over the noise inside
my ancient noisy car and noisy rear axle bearing (fixed that yesterday).

I don't see this suddenly getting better. The cellphone (also AT&T) showed good signal, but not enough to give a decent data rate
for streaming audio. Cellular data to computers isn't anywhere close enough to take a swipe at radio yet, at least out in the corn.

I’ve had mixed results with low bitrates on a Verizon connection in the car around Atlanta. They’re heading in the right direction but it’s going to be a few more years before mobile broadband is truly ready for prime time.

At home it’s a different story. The future is now if you have broadband and a wireless router. Wifi radio prices are falling below $200 and I’m hoping Santa is going to leave a one of these little gadgets under the tree this year.

Regardless of the delivery method, one thing that will never change is the local angle. You mentioned feeling “cut off” from live radio. I experienced the same thing with XM, and I still hit the big local AM news/talk station around the top of the hour.