alt Hacker NewsDigital radio was always going to be crap, it doesn't degrade gradually as signal gets worse They should have just put all the money into a better 4G network and ran radio through that.
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Bit of hindsight bias there, DAB was first developed in the mid 1990s, ubiquitous fast wireless IP in everyone’s pockets is at least a decade, perhaps nearer to 20 years in the future. There are quite a few transitionary technologies that we needn’t have developed had we just waited for something better to come along (but without the R&D into some of them…).
(Also doesn’t analogue FM also kinda cut off fairly abruptly?)
They do its called 5G broadcast. No, this doesn't require point to point connections.
One-to-one communications and broadcast communications are different. Perhaps every 4G tower could broadcast the news on a special data channel, but it would be a separate system from the main 4G data channel.
> it doesn't degrade gradually as signal gets worse
That has a lot more to do with the dated implementation and less to do with digital radio. There are a number of digital broadcasting techniques which can minimize and compensate for noise, including a slight delay with a signal correction and fault tolerant codecs.
DAB was implemented using the old MPEG2 audio codec. DAB+ uses the now 15 year old codec HE-AAC which isn't really designed to handle corruption. Opus handles loss a lot better (see their examples https://opus-codec.org/examples/ )