Radio Popolare Milano

Position 30 of 400 in Italy. The ordering is a click count and nothing more, but at this depth it still separates stations meaningfully, which stops being true further down the same list.

The directory counts 22 opens against this stream. That is well above Italy's median and it is the reason the station sits where it does on the country list, since the ordering is the count and nothing else.

The gap here is large: 64 kbps where Italy's stations typically run 128. Rates at this level were designed for dial-up and for mobile data that was billed by the megabyte, and plenty of stations simply never changed the setting.

Radio Popolare Milano streams in AAC while most of Italy's dial is MP3. Codec choice is mostly invisible to a listener, and it is one of the clearest fingerprints of which hosting provider a station uses, since providers default their customers into a format and few customers ever change it.

The stream is served from livex.radiopopolare.it, which no other entry in Italy 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.