8Radio

8Radio sits at 22 of 75 in Ireland's listing, in the body of the list rather than at either end. This is where most of a national dial actually lives, and it is the part a country hub's first fifty rows never reach.

With four recorded opens, 8Radio sits in the part of the directory where the numbers stop discriminating. The station's position in Ireland's list should be read as approximate for exactly that reason.

The country page counts alternative among its commonest tags, and this station is one of the 4 entries in Ireland behind that count. Worldwide the tag leads 124 stations, which makes the rail below a very wide shelf.

Worldwide it ranks 31 among 124 alternative entries, which is worth roughly as much as the count behind it and no more.

At 320 kbps, 8Radio streams at more than double Ireland's median of 128 kbps. That is a deliberate choice by whoever runs it: bandwidth is the recurring cost of an internet station, and a rate this far above the local norm is money spent on sounding better than the dial around it.

The stream is served from stream.rcast.net, which no other entry in Ireland uses in this snapshot. Nothing else in the listing shares its fate: if this address stops answering it is this broadcaster's own outage, and if it plays, it plays.