work hardware and software - a $50 billion investment. The band requires a unique mix of RF components, filters, switches, oscillators, RF amplifiers, low-noise amplifiers and RF amplifiers and associated matching components. These are typically 50 cent devices. The RF component industry is highly fragmented and works on margins that are significantly lower than other component sectors. Servicing subscale customer therefore implies an insupportable opportunity cost. The end result is that a $50 billion investment can be compromised and/or invalidated by an inability to source a few 50 cent components. The critical enablers for RF performance both in user equipment and radio network equip- ment can be summarised as materials innovation, for example gallium arsenide, or more recently gallium nitride, in RF power amplifiers, component innovation, for example SAW or FBAR filters, and algorithmic innovation, for example adaptive matching techniques or at higher layers of the OSI model adaptive traffic management and scheduling. Historically, these inventions and innovations have tended to originate from the West Coast of the US or Japan or Germany or Sweden or Finland or the UK or France to a greater or lesser extent. China, however, is producing 450 000 university graduate engineers a year with India not far behind. India already has a major footprint in global ICT and China has an increasingly global footprint in the provision of telecommunications equipment. Companies such as Huawei and ZTE have large internal markets and can increasingly exploit local intellectual resources to develop in-house intellectual property value that can be leveraged into external markets. A CTO from a European vendor pointed out that partly because of present exchange-rate anomalies, average engineering wage rates in mainland China are one tenth of European levels with a second level of subcontractors earning an order of magnitude less again. Combine this with preferential access to capital and it becomes obvious that Chinese vendors are