DAB – already covering 500 million people in 40 countries around the world – represents the fully mobile and narrowband (1.7 MHz) terrestrial branch of COFDM broadcasting technologies.

Although the family of DAB standards has been growing continuously from its beginnings in the early 90s, several major milestones have been reached by the WorldDAB / WorldDMB Forum, especially within the last three years. The most prominent examples are certainly DMB and DAB+. Those two and further applications, as well as the necessary framework created, are illustrated in this article.

The technical perspective is accompanied by an economic one, visualising the growth underway and the promising prospects that lie ahead, based on the substantially extended DAB toolkit.

DVB-SH is the name of a mobile broadcast standard designed to deliver video, audio and data services to small handheld devices such as mobile telephones, and to vehicle-mounted devices. The key feature of DVB-SH is the fact that it is a hybrid satellite/terrestrial system that will allow the use of a satellite to achieve coverage of large regions or even a whole country. In areas where direct reception of the satellite signal is impaired, and for indoor reception, terrestrial repeaters are used to improve service availability.

It is planned to use frequencies below 3 GHz, typically S-Band frequencies around 2.2 GHz adjacent to the 3G terrestrial frequencies. DVB began work on the DVB-SH specification in 2006. The system and waveform specifications have recently been released in the form of DVB Bluebooks, and sent to ETSI for publication as formal standards.