ue irrespective of whether the phone is an entry level, mid-tier or high-end device. There are exceptions to this. A mid-tier camera phone in 2007 for example had a value split of about 5% for the RF (including Bluetooth). The logic and digital circuits accounted for about 30%, memory at 12%, the LCD at 10%, the camera at 11%, PCB and electromechanical components at 13%, mechanical components at 14% and 'other bits' at 6%. It could be argued of course that the imaging bandwidth of this device would have deserved a more Making Telecoms Work Handset BOM Earpiece Packaging Charger Baseband Keypad Mechanical Battery Memory Figure 4.14 The RF BOM compared to other components 2010. Reproduced from RF Cost Economics for Handsets May 20072 highly specified RF functionality. It is, however, true that a need to support additional access technologies will introduce additional costs. These costs include nonrecurring expenditure (NRE) and component cost. This implies that volume thresholds are needed to support a supply of handsets that can be considered to be 'cost economic' in terms of RF-related NRE and RF-related component cost. In 2007 it was clear that this volume threshold was higher than generally acknowledged by many in the industry and was increasing over time. In addition, it was hard to achieve competitive RF performance unless certain volume thresholds were achieved. This implied that 'performance volume thresholds' and related 'performance scaling effects' needed to be factored in to spectral valuation and spectral allocation policy. It also highlighted the escalating cost and risk factors associated with geographically specific nonstandard spectral allocations, particularly in countries with relatively small addressable markets. These cost and risk factors were compounded by the implementation of nonstandard technologies. This explains why five years later, despite a large expansion in band allocations globally, most phones only support at most four or five bands and at most two wide-area radio access standards