ministry needed to ensure that necessary capital was in place for network construction and operation until the company could make enough money to survive. IPMobile presented letters of credit from banks and offers of Broadband Telecommunications Technologies and Management pmobile Figure 2.24 IPMobile business plan set submitted to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. The folder to the right is the overall summary and all others are reference documents. Reproduced with permission of Mari Sekine, the communications director of IPMobile at the time support from equity funds and fulfilled the main requirement from the ministry [19]. After the licence was granted, however, many of these investors did not find the IPMobile business model and plan sufficiently compelling and withdrew their support. Ultimately the failure of IPMobile came about because the necessary financial backing could not be secured. The business analysis carried out by investment funds would likely have looked at financial parameters such as total expected costs of build-up and operation and total expected revenue. They were also likely to have examined IPMobile's business model, including competitive environment, strategies, necessary suppliers and partnership and contributing factors. These and other contributing factors to ensuring a telecommunications technology business is suc- cessful are described below. Policy Analysis IPMobile's spectrum licence issuance depended on a number of government policy decisions. Many of these decisions had been made well prior to the 'Technology Council' of 2003. These included the participation of MIC in a global harmonisation of frequency spectrum allocation whereby 2010-2025 MHz was set aside for 3G services. International harmonisation of spectrum allocation was in fact a voluntary decision by the Japanese government to partly cede control of its telecommunications policy to ITU, an agency of the United Nations (UN). ITU had approved a set of technologies for its International Mobile Telecom