When was the last time you listened to any radio station on longwave? Right, no, I can't remember either. So why are some of us so sad to see the end of the 100-year-old broadcasting service?
Some readers, I fully acknowledge, will have no idea what I'm talking about. If that's you, well, you probably have heard of FM radio. It's what most people have grown up listening to, before DAB took off. If you've ever wondered what that AM button did on your first car, well, that's the setting you need to receive longwave or medium wave radio. It's what you still need to receive BBC Radio 5 Live if you're in an older car.
The difference between the two is that longwave can reach much further distances, particularly at night. It's said that the BBC's longwave service could occasionally be picked up as far away as North America, and even very rarely New Zealand, under the right conditions.
Being honest, there wasn't much demand left for longwave radio broadcasts. The BBC estimated that there were only 90,000 listeners regularly tuning into Radio 4 on an AM radio. Although, of course, it's hard to know for sure; measuring how many people in Africa might be listening would require extensive opinion polling that I suspect hasn't been carried out. And no one can track a radio that's tuning in. The real number could be much higher.
To their credit, the BBC prepared for this by making it very easy to listen to all the corporation's radio stations, wherever you are in the world, via the worldwide BBC.com website. Although at the same time, BBC Studios (the commercial arm) shut down international access to the BBC Sounds app. Can't have anyone getting too much of anything for free, evidently.
Of course, all this requires a device that is connected to the internet, has a web browser (or the capability to install apps), and plenty of power to charge it. Although much of the world now does have these devices, the latest estimate from 2024 suggests that 2.5 billion people still don't use the internet. That's not far off a third of the worldwide population. And where there are people without internet access, there are commonly plenty of radios that can receive longwave. Many parts of the world, especially countries with a large landmass or many islands, like Indonesia or the Americas - including the United States - still rely on MW and LW radio to reach people.
For many, the problems of internet access, smartphone ownership, and energy haven't improved since 1994, when a British inventor, Trevor Baylis, finally got someone to take his idea of a wind-up radio seriously. His appearance on Tomorrow's World put him in touch with the financiers who took the idea into production, and eventually the creation of a foundation to distribute radios across Africa in the hope that access to better quality information would alleviate the HIV/AIDS crisis. In just eight years, 3.5 million were made, and the Lifeline Energy Foundation has distributed more than 700,000 radios over its existence. This is before you even calculate UN-backed projects. In short, there are a lot of rural communities, tuning into the rest of the world from a wind-up or solar-powered radio, many of whom now won't be able to listen to BBC programming.
If this all sounds a bit white saviour to you, then it might put your mind at ease to know that UNESCO, to this day, continues to help poorer parts of the world set up their own community radio stations, offering localised programming presented by people from the countries and regions in which they're broadcasting.
However, I still can't be pleased that British programming now won't reach these parts of the world.
It's an understatement to say that our political system is currently under strain. But with 74% of the worldwide population living under autocratic rule, according to the V-Dem Institute, I took comfort that the daily banalities of a functioning democracy were being beamed across most of the most populous hemisphere. No, they probably didn't need to know the ins and outs of Lord Alli paying for Keir Starmer's suits, but it did demonstrate that a high level of transparency and accountability is possible and being practised somewhere out there in the world.
And this brings me to the most important point. Radio broadcasts are quite difficult to block from your territory completely. The Soviet Union invested heavily in radio jamming to block out Western broadcasts, but with mixed success. Enough people still received the messages. Today, websites can be blocked with far greater ease, and Russia keeps BBC.com out of all territory it controls, as do other regimes.
At the start of the Ukraine-Russia war, the BBC started broadcasting its Ukrainian language service on shortwave from London, with relays in Slovakia and Cyprus.
If it's important during wartime, I argue that it's worthwhile during periods of relative peace. While the UK is decommissioning this sort of infrastructure, Australia is still investing in renewing this type of equipment for emergencies. Coincidentally, just after the BBC switch-off, the Australian Telstra network failed, leaving trains unable to run, card payments unable to be processed, and no telephone calls for around twelve hours. Surely, it's prudent that we have some tried and tested backup technologies, ready to use if the worst should happen?
There are very few current affairs stories from Britain where privatisation doesn't offer some explanation for something, and this is no exception. The LW transmitters used to broadcast Radio 4 up until June 2026 weren't actually owned by the corporation any more. 1990s privatisation saw transmitter technology sold to American firms, later resulting in the creation of Arqiva in 2005. The offshore-owned firm simply didn't want to find ways to preserve the transmitter. This is not altogether an unfair conclusion; warnings that they were running out of high-power thermionic valves - that are no longer manufactured - arose in 2011, and the decision to buy the worldwide remaining supply was taken. The machinery to make the glass valves is long-dismantled, and Europe lacks any workforce trained in the art of producing them.
This only tells part of the story. Longwave and other frequencies can be broadcast without them; newer technologies that, although I can't pretend to fully understand them, do exist. But to decide to spend money on them would require a greater value to be placed on the ability for the UK to broadcast radio to the world.
This is not where recent governments, or often the BBC itself, are at. The decision to close the international version of the BBC News channel, and instead rely on broadcasting the domestic edition, results in a split screen of Count Binface on one half, a serious earthquake on the other. Perhaps this says more about the quality of the current BBC News channel, but ultimately something has been - or rather, is being - lost. I can never grasp quite how successive Labour and Conservative administrations have failed to see the merit of the UK's soft power being beamed to the televisions, radios, and phones, of a willing worldwide audience.
Counter to all this, the current government and the new Director General do seem to be making attempts to ensure public broadcasting survives the jump to streaming. Although they should tread carefully, I can't help but welcome the notion that BBC and other public programming will end up with greater prominence on YouTube. After all, the platform is now more likely to be viewed on a television than in a web browser.
We need to regain our confidence that British media is worth exporting, and in ways that reach the entire world, not just those with an internet connection. The Comcast (via Sky) purchase of ITV offers yet more evidence of this. Let's just ensure that it is us, the UK, that is at the reins, before any more falls into the hands of the Americans.
In researching this article, I came across an Instagram post from the Technology Brief news influencer channel. It has over 205,000 followers, regularly gets tens of thousands of likes, and follows a format by which a long caption delivers news and information to hundreds of thousands around the world.
In its coverage of the longwave switch-off, it describes the final few moments of Radio 4:
"The final transmission closed with the Shipping Forecast, a brief farewell from the announcer, and a mournful musical interlude before the signal faded to static."
As one commenter put it, "A mournful musical interlude is a fascinating way of describing the national anthem."
I wouldn't, personally, be prepared to put a bet on whether these Instagram news pages use AI to write their captions, but the general consensus is that they do, and with it, inaccuracies are rife. With longwave gone, and other technologies - even television news - on the way out, this is what we're left with. I suspect we might come to regret it.
