his would be of the order of 7 dB. Even taking low price points for individual components the overall BOM would be substantially higher than most other phones shipped into most other markets. This makes no commercial sense either for the operator community in China or for the supply chain or for end users who would end up with a phone with poor sensitivity and selectivity that would translate directly into dropped calls and depressingly short voice and data duty cycles. Poor RF performance would also reduce coverage and absorb operator network capacity and increase customer support costs. However, there is still a conundrum here in that additional bands mean that one phone can be shipped to more markets, thus achieving greater scale gain and savings in inventory management. However, this is more than offset by additional component cost and performance loss. The Holy Grail is therefore to be able to add bands and/or technologies without additional cost and without performance loss. We examine the practicalities of this in Chapter 5. In the meantime, RF component vendors can breathe at least a temporary sigh of relief as their price point erosion has proved less severe than might have been expected five years ago. Telecommunications Economies of Scale Effectively they have been saved by the smart phone, a device costing $200 rather than $20 dollars selling at $500 rather than $50 dollars with various add on value opportunities of which insurance against damage and loss is bizarrely important. 4.6 Summary The dynamics of the RF supply chain are complex and occasionally counterintuitive but exhibit the classic gravitational effect typical of large-volume markets with dominant product sectors. In wide-area wireless the dominant legacy technology is GSM. The theoretical spectral efficiency benefits of UMTS/WCDMA might have been expected to encourage a relatively rapid transition from the 'older' to newer' technology, but this has not happened for several reasons. The gravitational effect of the large legacy market has 