int where no 1 http://qotd.me/q2007-01-29.html. Introduction one could receive anything clearly. The Federal Communications Commission was established in 1934 to impose order on chaos and the basic principles of radio and TV regulation became established in national and later international law. As a result, spectral policy today has a direct impact on radio engineering cost and complexity. If standards making and spectral policy are focused on achieving improvements in technical efficiency then the result will generally be an improvement in commercial efficiency. An improvement in commercial efficiency can be translated into improved returns to shareholders and/or some form of associated social gain. This topic would fill several books on its own but it is useful to reflect on two important trends. Harmonised and mandatory standards have been crucial in delivering R and D scale efficiency more or less across the whole history of telecommunications. Within mobile com- munications for example, the rapid expansion of GSM over the past twenty years would almost certainly not have happened without robust pan-European and later global standards support. More recent experiments with technology neutrality in which an assumption is made that 'the market can decide' have been less successful. Markets are determined by short-term financial pressures. These are inconsistent with the longer-term goals that are or should be implicit in the standards-making process. Mobile Broadband Auction Values - Spectral Costs and Liabilities and Impact on Operator Balance Sheets In parallel, spectral policy has been increasingly determined by an assumption that the market is capable of making a rational assessment of spectral value with that value realisable through an auction process. Superficially that process would have appeared to be significantly successful, but in practice the 1995/1996 US PCS auctions produced the world's first cellular bankruptcies (Next Wave and Pocket Communications), the 2002 UMTS auctions emasculated BT, left F