meant that vendors make more money out of innovating for established markets with known volume. The purpose of the innovation is to reduce cost and improve performance. A failure to innovate has an associated opportunity cost. A similar lag effect can now be observed in LTE and will be examined in more detail in the next chapter. RF innovation has also had to deliver on two fronts - new bands and evolving standards that have become more complex over time. GSM standardisation has moved forward with the introduction of EDGE and higher-order modulation and coding and channel aggregation options. WCDMA has evolved into HSPA and HSPA has evolved into HSPA + and at least partially integrated with the LTE standards road map from Release 8 onwards. Competing standard such as WiMax have further diluted R and D effort. The impact of this to date is that WCDMA handsets, HSPA handsets and LTE devices have not performed in RF terms as well as they might have done. This has made it harder to realise the theoretical spectral efficiency benefits achievable from the newer technologies. parallel, there is scant evidence to suggest that energy efficiency on a bit-delivered basis has substantially improved other than as a result of increased network density that incurs additional capital and operational cost. Once upon a time handset manufacturers and network hardware manufacturers were one and the same. Motorola manufactured handsets and networks, SO did Nokia, SO did Ericsson, SO did Alcatel, even Nortel had a handset division. One by one these companies either abandoned handset manufacture or decoupled their handset and network development and manufacturing activities. The result is that network equipment and system vendors no longer have control over handset performance. Unfortu- nately, as we shall see in the next chapter neither do operators. This is an even greater cause for concern. Wireless User Hardware Military and Commercial Enabling Technologies I am not sure where to start in this chapter. The beginning is always a goo