To answer your other point about replacing AM/FM broadcast with IP delivery.
This is not an efficient way of delivering the information. A broadcast is a single transmission that can be received by anyone without impacting the ability of others to then receive it. For large numbers of viewers/listeners it's a very efficient method of delivering information, and very cost effective, only having to pay for one big transmitter and a license for one channel.
If we look at it in terms of data-rates, a typical DAB radio channel may be 128kbps and might reach a million people.
Using a WiFi mesh network would mean that 128kbps audio stream would need to be transmitted to each user individually, so that's increased the data transmitted by a factor of 1 million (or however many listeners there are). Of course this is spread over the whole listener base, the real impact would be much more localised. Perhaps 10 people are listening to the same stream on 'your' mesh. That's still 10 identical streams going to 10 people where before you only had 1.
Of course there is IP Multicasting which reduces this problem, not sure how it would work in a Wireless Mesh environment though.
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To answer your other point about replacing AM/FM broadcast with IP delivery.
This is not an efficient way of delivering the information. A broadcast is a single transmission that can be received by anyone without impacting the ability of others to then receive it. For large numbers of viewers/listeners it's a very efficient method of delivering information, and very cost effective, only having to pay for one big transmitter and a license for one channel.
If we look at it in terms of data-rates, a typical DAB radio channel may be 128kbps and might reach a million people.
Using a WiFi mesh network would mean that 128kbps audio stream would need to be transmitted to each user individually, so that's increased the data transmitted by a factor of 1 million (or however many listeners there are). Of course this is spread over the whole listener base, the real impact would be much more localised. Perhaps 10 people are listening to the same stream on 'your' mesh. That's still 10 identical streams going to 10 people where before you only had 1.
Of course there is IP Multicasting which reduces this problem, not sure how it would work in a Wireless Mesh environment though.