Arqiva apologises for Sunday DAB outage

Arqiva has apologised for Sunday's commercial radio outage on the DAB platform, which was caused by the "rare failure" of a power supply.

Members on Digital Spy's Radio forum started reporting the outage - including main stations Classic FM, Absolute Radio and talkSPORT - on the Digital One DAB shortly after 10am on Sunday.

Transmissions firm Arqiva explained that the problem was caused by a failure to the Uninterruptible Power Supply at 9.01am. Additional battery support allowed the commercial stations and certain local stations to continue broadcasting on DAB until 9.56am, when they went off air.

Arqiva said that some services, including talkSPORT, Classic FM and BFBS Radio, came back on air at 10.40am after the emergency multiplexer was activated at Emley Moor. However, all other stations did not return until 11.42am at the earliest.

"We apologise for the loss of Digital One and some other commercial and BBC DAB services on Sunday morning following the rare failure of an Uninterruptible Power Supply. The unit was only renewed very recently," said Arqiva managing director of radio Paul Eaton.

"This affected the IP distribution hub at Croydon, resulting in the loss of programme input to the transmitter network. We were able to deploy engineers quickly so that some services were restored within an hour, supported by a back-up system at Emley Moor.

"All DAB services were back to normal within two hours. An investigation has been launched to see what improvements can be made to the system and prevent recurrence."