es of multimedia rates 500 kbits Satellite Networks 16.9 Why the Performance Gap Between Cellular and Two-Way Radio will Continue to Increase Over Time This is not specifically a technology constraint but more a consequence of limited engineering resources. Substantial engineering resources are needed to develop and ratify standards. Substantial engineering resources are then needed to interpret these standards and trans- late them into performance-competitive cost-competitive radio products, handsets and base stations. This is one reason why the performance gap between cellular phones and two-way radios continues to widen. Silicon vendors and handset manufacturers producing cellular and mobile broadband quad and quintuple band chip sets are servicing a unified market that is now running at over one billion units per year. Companies like Nokia and the silicon and component vendors supporting Nokia and other Tier 1 cellular handset manufacturers have to treat this dominant market as an absolute priority when deciding on the allocation of engineering development resources. This 'market pull' gravitational effect also helps to focus efforts on meeting other user requirements such as interoperability and roaming. The opportunity costs of servicing markets that are several orders of magnitude smaller compounded by the 'divide down' effect of needing to support multiple standards for these minority markets makes it extremely difficult to justify investment in two-way radio handset or infrastructure radio hardware and software development. The result is that products come to market more slowly, are more expensive, and are generally more limited in terms of their radio functionality, at least as far as overall data rates are concerned. 16.10 What This Means for Two-Way Radio Network Operators So this tells us two things. Specialist user expectations are changing over time. These expec- tations are partly driven by personal exposure to rapidly evolving cellular handset form factor and functionality. These expectations inc