 TO 2030 lighter physical support infrastructure. The local loop is instantaneous with base- station commissioning, and only demands construction of a fixed "core" (or trunk backhaul) network, which can be quite rapid especially if an existing trunk infrastructure can be used to some extent. Thus, the trend in consumption of telecommunications and its supporting infrastructure is to ever more mobile communications. So far that has been in cellular mobile. But by 2030 new mobile technologies currently grouped under the heading of Alternative Wireless Technologies (AWTs), such as WiMax with lighter infrastructures, will have an increasingly important part to play for both economic and technical reasons. The power of a consumer economy - the rise in income and the fall in tariffs to near-zero levels - to produce a global infrastructure for all Today's economies have moved from being agricultural, to heavy and light industrial, to consumerist. Falls in consumer spending no longer reflect recession - they precipitate them. The rise in telecommunication usage is a consumer movement, driven by mobile take-up by a global user population. As incomes rise and the cost of telecommunications falls, the number of users and their usage is increasing. For the world's poorest, mobile offers many the first and only chance to telecommunicate. The main driver therefore of this global expansion in the user population is disposable income. GDP per head is not accurate as an indicator of personal gross (or disposable) income, but it is a useful trend indicator. Current disposable income according to the World Bank is examined in the Table 2.10. The table shows that some 2.4 billion people are in the annual income bracket of USD 765-3 035. At this level they are on the point of being able to afford mobile telecommunications, or already have it, for a phone costing under USD 40, lasting 1-2 years, and with call cost expenditures of USD 5-10 per month and under. Of course, the potential is far larger, with 4.8 billion people having under