Internet radio has MANY potential points of failure, particularly during emergency situations, when electric power is unreliable, or out for many days.
AM radio has a"head office " situation, studio and broadcast transmitter, both of which normally have emergency power supply's and generators capable of sustaining the station for several days. AM radio in cars can operate from car batteries. AM has significantly longer range than FM. Satellite radio , would be nowhere as wide spread as AM radio in cars. ( On a unrelated note, it is my opinion that the mobile phone network should have reliability standards for power supply - ie base stations and other network elements would keep operation if the commercial/ public electric supply was down - as often happens in emergency situations - like floods / cyclones / hurricanes / typhoons " Electric car makers need to try much harder to reduce their vehicles Radio Frequency Interference or RFI
> On a unrelated note, it is my opinion that the mobile phone network should have reliability standards for power supply
Maybe they should, but they don't. In my neck of the woods, towers start dropping off after 4 hours, and in 6 hours, they're all gone. I don't have a real landline, but my DSL line has zero seconds of run time when utility power drops; sometimes I get lucky and the DSLAM maintains service through a trip/reclose event, but usually that's enough to drop the connection and then I have to reboot my modem because the two ends won't resync otherwise. (NBD, I have automation)
When I have an outage of any kind in my area the towers go offline after just a few minutes. If the power is off in the area, everyone pulls out their phone and starts using it for data. The towers can't handle that many active units and I lose service.
There's just so many cell towers compared to radio broadcast stations. The very nature of the frequencies demand it. You would need ~$1m upgrades to every tower to retrofit with generators capable of lasting more than a week.
I think it would have a huge impact on monthly bills for cell service. Likely one that the general subscriber would not appreciate given the rarity of a knockout event.
In these more rural areas where it's more likely for trees to take out the power supply and restoration takes a long time, adding solar and battery backup would be much cheaper, and might even make it's cost back in reduced power cost during non-emergency times.
Arguing that AM "has significantly longer range" is quite foolish. The range of AM on the long wave band is the entire Earth, in some cases many times over. We use to allow very high power AM stations in the US that covered all of North America but that was phased out.
We still do allow this on the shortwave bands under very limited circumstances like WBCQ.
RE "...Arguing that AM "has significantly longer range" is quite foolish..." I should have made it clear, I meant the present AM band which is around 550 Khz to 1600 Khz and the present FM band from about 88 Mhz to about 108 MHZ . At the present band frequencies AM radio has a much longer range. ( Most people would not have a receiving capable of receiving Long Wave AM which is on a significantly lower frequency around a few 100 KHz or much less. )
AM radio has a"head office " situation, studio and broadcast transmitter, both of which normally have emergency power supply's and generators capable of sustaining the station for several days. AM radio in cars can operate from car batteries. AM has significantly longer range than FM. Satellite radio , would be nowhere as wide spread as AM radio in cars. ( On a unrelated note, it is my opinion that the mobile phone network should have reliability standards for power supply - ie base stations and other network elements would keep operation if the commercial/ public electric supply was down - as often happens in emergency situations - like floods / cyclones / hurricanes / typhoons " Electric car makers need to try much harder to reduce their vehicles Radio Frequency Interference or RFI