ship between standards and government regulations. The largest governmental issue related to wireless is the allocation of specific frequencies. Available bandwidth is considered a limited natural resource and is managed by governments. They allocate particular frequencies in particular geographic regions for particular pur- poses, and the space fills up pretty quickly. This makes manufacturing of equipment for international sales difficult because the equipment must work in different frequencies for different countries. Fortunately, most countries follow either the U.S. pattern of spectrum allocation or the European pattern of spectrum allocation. The choice of fre- quencies of operation has been a major issue in the development of ITU's 3G standard. Initially it was hoped that governments might reallocate bandwidth or allocate unused bandwidth, allowing a single set of frequencies to be used for all terrestrial wireless communications worldwide. This did not happen, and the European and American bandwidths for their 2G systems (GSM and PCS) got carried over into 3G. In addition, Japan has allocated frequencies on its own unique program and needs to coordinate 3G deployment with its existing 2G Personal Digital Cellular (PDC) system. When the 3G standards committee of the ITU failed to bring the world into one har- monious standard, it approved five different standards, saying that each of them met the requirements for certification as 3G. Each standard, of course, was proposed and developed by an industry group or consortium. Since ITU's decision, each of them has been developing and promoting its own standard in competition with the others, with billions of dollars at stake. This has led to significant clouding of technical issues as each group sometimes attacks the others and sometimes obscures real issues in com- plex verbiage to reduce its vulnerability to attack. We will discuss this unfortunate sit- uation further in Sec. 9.2.3. However, sometimes even the political side of standards clearly leads to good