Introduction to Wi-Fi radios

Will Sony start a Wi-Fi radio revolution?

In his keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Sony's chief exec, Sir Howard Stringer, said that 90% of all Sony's products would be able to connect to the Internet by 2011. The significance of this is that once an audio device has Wi-Fi built-in, it is then very cheap and easy to add support for Internet radio.

All that's needed for an audio device that already has Wi-Fi to support Internet radio is for a slightly larger memory chip to be used, and the manufacturer would either need to licence the use of an Internet radio database, or they could develop the database themselves. Both of these things would only amount to a few pence extra per device. In comparison, it costs a few pounds to add support for DAB.

So you would expect that Sony would enable Internet radio on quite a lot of its audio products over the next 2 - 3 years. And if Sony does this, you would also expect other manufacturers to add Wi-Fi and to enable Internet radio on their audio products as well.

So it's possible that the number of devices that support Internet radio could mushroom over the next 2 - 3 years, in which case Wi-Fi Internet radio would move from being at the early adopter stage, where it is now, to becoming a mass market product.

The biased BBC bullies won't be happy

The BBC basically led the Digital Radio Working Group, which recommended to government recently that everyone should be bullied into listening via DAB and that Internet radio should effectively be killed off because the BBC won't promote it. So considering that the BBC was willing to take a decision that is completely against the interests of the general public, this shows just how biased the BBC is against Internet radio, so the BBC will no doubt throw its toys out of the pram if Sony ruins its anti-consumer protectionist plans and turn Wi-Fi Internet radio into a mass market success. Hopefully Sony will stand up for consumers and not allow itself to be bullied by the disgraced BBC digital radio team. (In case you're wondering: yes, I am the BBC's biggest fan.)

Additional costs to support Internet radio

Internet radio database costs

The advantage that Internet radio has is that the Internet is global. So the cost of either licensing the use of an Internet radio database, or the cost involved for a manufacturer to develop a database itself, would be spread over all products that the manufacturer would sell worldwide that support Internet radio. So you would expect that the cost per device should only be a few pence.

Flash memory costs

Audio devices that support MP3 and other audio formats will already include a flash memory chip to store the software that implements the audio decoding, so to support Internet radio a device would just need a slightly bigger flash chip to store the software that implements Internet radio. Judging by the size of Internet radio applications, the code size required would be about 200 - 300 KB.

In September 2007, flash memory chips cost around 6 pence per Mbit, and they're sold in sizes of 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 etc Mbits. But Moore's Law doubles the size of flash chips every 18 months or so without increasing their price, so the cost per Mbit effectively halves every 18 months or so. So you would expect flash chips to be about 3 or 4 pence per Mbit by now. 200 - 300 KB works out to be 1.6 - 2.4 Mbits, so the additional flash memory costs should only be about 6 - 8 pence or so today. By 2011, two more 18-month iterations of Moore's Law would have passed, so the additional cost would have reduced to just a couple of pence by then.

SDRAM costs

Audio devices require an SDRAM chip or SDRAM to be built-into an ASIC chip. Internet radios would require additional SDRAM capacity for the buffer that stores audio that's been received from the Internet which is waiting to be played out. Assuming the maximum buffer size required would need to hold 20 seconds-worth of audio at a maximum bit rate of 320 kbps, this would require 800 KB of space.

In September 2007, an 8 MB SDRAM chip cost 75p, and a 16 MB chip cost £1.00. Considering that 800 KB is relatively small compared to 8 or 16 MB, it's possible that support for Internet radio wouldn't require the use of a larger SDRAM chip. If one would be required, the difference in price between a 16 and 8 MB chip was 25p sixteen months ago, so you would expect that that would almost have halved to 12.5p today due to Moore's Law. Applying a couple more iterations of Moore's Law, that would reduce the cost to about 3 - 4 pence extra by 2011.

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