The pundits' predictions for the coming year have included a fair stack of ‘What’s not going to happen’ – it being safer to forecast failure than risk reputations on uncertain success.

Our year starts with a special challenge for regulators like Ofcom and their European counterparts.  Innovative technologies leapfrog established ways of doing business and the associated legal frameworks – so regulators spend much of their time trying to walk up the down escalator.  The European Telecoms Framework is up for review.  The recent regulatory protests from UK Telecoms Resellers illustrate that this stuff is vital but dangerously sleep-inducing.

So, spare a moment to contemplate your own exceptional good fortune - and the wonders of the much amended Wireless Telegraphy Act of 1949.  Without a General Exemption to this ancient Act each of us would need a licence for those portable wireless transmitters that we call mobile phones.   And, inevitably, if there can be Exemptions there can also be Exceptions to the Exemptions – which is, more or less, what the GSM Gateway saga is all about.

On past form we fear that European governments will simply shrug their collective shoulders and argue that it is for their own National Regulators to decide on Exceptions etc. – and the prospect of harmonisation across Europe will recede once more along with the location flexibility and productivity that is badly needed by competitive enterprises of all sizes.

We’ll be submitting the CMA response to the Commission by the end of January.   Most enterprises will be blissfully unaware that this Review provides a significant opportunity to reshape the way we all do business. We will argue for a General Exception to current practice – that the European Commission should listen up and start taking the international mobile phone business seriously.  

So for the pessimistic pundits – the ‘do nothing its all hopeless’ brigade – your reputations are on the line.   And with DTI Minister Alun Michael MP scheduled to speak at the CMA conference in February this is just the start of what promises to be an Exceptional Year.

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First published in NetworkingPlus, January 2006