Digital broadcast radio in Australia uses the DAB+ standard and is available in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, Canberra, Darwin and Hobart.
[2] Despite testing in Sydney and Melbourne from as early as 1999, the first genuine plan for digital broadcast radio was released in October 2005, as Helen Coonan, the then Australian Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, announced that Australia would adopt the Eureka 147 system.
The Australian Government had set a launch date for digital broadcast radio in the six state capital cities, originally 1 January 2009, but this launch date was subsequently shifted back to no later than 1 July 2009[3] and the list of cities starting digital broadcast radio excluded Hobart.
Community digital broadcast radio services were rolled out to capital cities in late 2010 to May 2011 and were formally launched in May 2011.
The audio quality of Australian DAB is correspondingly low - only 80 kbps for ClassicFM, for example, and most channels have much lower bitrates than this.
So DAB is in general well below the 128 kbps traditionally accepted as CD quality, and an interference-free FM broadcast will almost certainly provide better audio.
However, since these commercial broadcasters have been given extra bandwidth on the digital platform, digital-only stations launched, including Triple M Classic Rock (Southern Cross Austereo) The Edge Digital (ARN) and NovaNation (formerly DMG),[23] Community Radio stations with a citywide licence have reserved spectrum, equalling 2/9s of the capacity on each commercial multiplex.
During late 2010 and early 2011 most of the eligible community stations in Melbourne and several in Sydney and Brisbane began test transmissions.