mobile listening - the results of my experiments

General Lighting

Super Moderator
Staff member
for some months I have used liquidsoap on another VPS I rent (that also is the helpdesk for my employers; I resell part of this to them) to transcode my 192k mp3 stream to a 96k aac stream for mobile listening. (http://uk4.internet-radio.com:10936/mobile.m3u)

I usually listen to this when cycling to and from my work site in the rural areas (SW Ipswich to and from Mid Suffolk).

This is the speed and elevation profile of the 11km route (units are all in metric for easier compariso globally - I am also riding an e-bike; in case anyone wonders how I am getting around at that sort of speed at my age ;) )

15866345227_a55d94e276_b.jpg


I use a Windows Phone (Nokia Lumia 930) on the t-mobile/EE network) which gives the best reception along this route. I have used other devices and O2/giffgaff but they do not work in the more rural area at the end of the journey.

Results have been acceptable sound quality wise - the main annoyance being that the whole stream cuts out when you go out of range of the 3/4G equipped base stations and it needs to be restarted from the phone screen. This can happen 3/4 times during the journey, usually at the points of large changes in altitude. Restarting the stream is not easy if you are wearing gloves and of course not safe if it affects your control of the bike (I did pay attention to road safety throughout these experiments!).

It seems all the players do this; which is most likely a limitation of the mobile networks.

Another limitation is that when a lot of other folk are using mobiles around you your stream may drop (I believe that voice calls are prioritised because of UK/EU rules over access to 999 / 112 ) - there does seem to be another "priority stream" used by the Emergency Services for their 3G devices but otherwise you get the same access as everyone else; its just the towers get overloaded.

Most of the time you can get "good reception" and listen for a fair few minutes - it takes about 1 megabyte out of a data bundle per minute but that is not too bad if you are only listening for about 20-40 minutes each day on a mobile device.

I certainly would not recommend trying to listen in a motor car (not even as a passenger); as the stream drops suddenly and the distraction of restarting the playback is going to be unsafe!

Perhaps things are better in big cities - and mobile radio is in its infancy. it would be interesting to hear others' experiences (remember to state what country, region and network you are using!)
 

Mayedd

Member
We stream a number off different bitrates on mp3 and one on AAC (after you previous suggestion). That is at 48K AAC and the quality is amazing, takes very little data and is very good when in patchy areas of signal.
 

LG73

New Member
I stream in my car, usually 56k or 64k HE-AAC streams using an app called StreamS Hifi Radio on my iPhone over a Fido LTE connection (sometimes switches to 3G) and it rarely ever cuts out. One key to success with in-car listening is to run an app that knows how to properly buffer the stream so it doesn't cut out during brief drops in the cellular signal. In the city it's more reliable than Sirius satellite radio.

I hadn't run a Speed Test on my cell connection in many months. Tried one yesterday while at an area in Vancouver with 5 dot reception and was surprised by the results: http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/i/1368832215

In case the link doesn't work, it tested with 139.92 Mb/s down and 43.55 Mb/s up! That smokes my fibre connection at home.

Amazing to me how much mobile Internet has improved in this decade!


Cheers,
Philip
 

General Lighting

Super Moderator
Staff member
The quality does vary from country to country; it can be patchy in European border areas due to commercial issues over roaming agreements (radio signals do not care about national borders or which company sends/receives them!)

To be fair I noticed yesterday at work) that T-Mobile/EE (UK) have now upgraded the rural area to 4G/3G+ and even managed not to upset the linear UHF TV signals by using the nearby frequencies; although this may well be because the antenna masts are at Arqiva Sudbury or Mendlesham and the same organisation also run the TV transmitters.

This is very recent as when I carried out the experiments in February 2015 I only got GPRS mobile internet in that area.

In many countries especially those which follow European tech practices (Canada combines both USA and European tech practices) there is a trend to use 4G/3G/LTE for everything including public service broadcasting and even emergency service comms (their equipments do have priority SIMS) ; as legacy analogue comms equipment is decomissioned. There is often some amount of public subsidy for the upgrades (if you are curious it will be explained on the Government or Communications Ministry websites).

I must admit I had to double check where Vancouver is on a map; I often to get places in Canada mixed up [due to its sheer size] and a friend from Flickr who lives in Canada there gave me the impression that wherever he lives there are bears wandering around in the back alleyways (he has won an award for his photos of them) He assured me it wasn't anything to be worried about as there is plenty of room for everyone where he lives and the bears are friendlier than in the USA or Japan (and unlike the SE Asian ones too big to climb a mobile mast; which caused a lot of problems in the 1990s as they knocked all the antennas off alignment).

I guess you are driving in the Southern bit which looks more built up than the North where the mountains are - being a coastal area is a bonus as there are likely to be plenty of existing antenna masts available for VHF/UHF comms used by shipping and aviation. Round this way Felixstowe was the first area to get reliable 3G mobile Internet.

The apps I use do have good buffering (up to 16 seconds) but if the incoming data stream cannot fill the buffer in time the stream will still cut out - that is unfortunately at the mercy of the mobile data providers. Apparently much of the legacy GSM/UMTS (or whatever it is called across the pond) equipment is becoming obsolete so has to be replaced anyway quite soon...
 
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