The way that the network industry organises itself is being questioned from many angles but is the business community paying enough attention? 

In the global Standards arena there have been worrying signs of an upheaval in the balance between commercial and societal investments.   Many governments take the politically safe option; preferring not to have an opinion or get too deeply involved so long as they can rely on corporate muscle to deliver the answers they can live with.   

With meetings coming up soon for the World Radio Conference (WRC) there’s a huge push from commercial interests to bolt down spectrum allocations for particular technologies despite many countries having an official policy of technology neutrality.   Never mind that both industry and consumers need spectrum harmonisation to make things work.  In many countries, policy makers prefer a light touch.   Apparently it keeps the political hands clean, at least until there’s clear evidence of market failure and citizens start to think they’ve been short-changed.

There’s much concern from the WiMAX camp that, at the upcoming WRC, the 3G/IMT brigade may have all the best tunes and make off with even more spectrum to add to their already huge (and largely unused) allocation.   The WiMaxian solution, apparently, is to undergo surgical removal of embarrassment glands and claim that they too belong to the 3G/IMT family.  No-one, it seems, can be bothered to point out that both camps would be better off if they focused their energies on spectral efficiency and made far better use of far less spectrum at far lower radiated power levels.   

Green policies haven’t yet tackled waste and pollution in the airwaves but maybe even here the climate will change soon.   Even then, convincing the big boys to sell fewer but better-designed base stations to deliver vastly improved services to customers will still be an uphill battle.  Design sub-optimisation is proving as addictive as inbuilt obsolescence.    

Nearer to home the recent report on next generation broadband from the UK’s Broadband Stakeholders Group was a truly remarkable achievement – slightly bucking the trend against failure to find consensus.   But the price paid for this moment of collective acceptance was writ large in its action-neutrality.  Disaster may be looming – but, just like climate change attitudes a few years back, we’ve not yet seen the evidence, or not yet chosen to believe it.    Maybe, says the report, we should be doing some experiments – a vaguely positive-sounding idea that doesn’t require the establishment to admit that, in many places, fibre is more fact than fiction, despite the obstacles and ignorance that inhibit progress.

This feature was first piublished in the May 07 issue of NetworkingPlus magazine