 Information can have emotional value. It can also be misused, but in general it has to be assumed that informed decisions and actions are better than uninformed decisions and actions. Broader and more efficient access to information should at least theoretically enable wiser more broadly collective decision making, the world should become more intellectually efficient. However, the tobacco analogy would suggest there may be longer-terms costs attached that are not presently visible and might only become evident in the distant future. It has taken Europeans 500 years to wake up to the health risks of tobacco but if the world was to worry about unknowable long-term risk then the world would never move on. In the meantime, telecommunications industry appears to have reinvented itself more by accident than intent. The economic implications are, however, neither simple nor straightforward. 12.5 Amortisation Time Scales Electromechanical switches were expensive to develop and slow to be deployed. In the UK depressed wage rates after the First World War meant that it was more economic to use human operators to set up a call. The financial returns from the investment were substantial but were based on an extended deployment cycle. The development cost of the Strowger exchanges still in use in the 1990s had been amortised over more than 100 years and the capital costs would have typically been amortised over forty years or more. Wireless Radio Access Network Hardware It would be surprising if the electronic switches installed over the past thirty years did not have a similar long tail in terms of investment return. Old technology takes a surprisingly long time to die. The counterargument is that the computing revolution has changed the economic rule book and that R and D and capital amortisation now has to be achieved in months not years and certainly not over fifty years or more. The fact that a Cray computer was still being used fifteen years after it was delivered is considered curious. But communications is not compu