ecific technology solutions within the US market make even less economic sense. China is arguably the only market with sufficient volume and local design and manufacturing capability to be able to support national- or operator-specific band plans and technologies, but even this does not mean that such policies make any kind of long-term economic sense. The problem is that in all markets, China, the US and Rest of the World, spectral allocation and auction policy is based on economic modelling that fails to capture relevant cost and value dynamics. So as a reminder of what is in effect the ongoing narrative of this book there are, we would argue, five separate but coupled domains that need to be analysed: 15.22 Technology Economics This is the area most directly coupled to the standards process. Our contention here is that false market ambitions, specifically high peak data rates per user are introducing unneces- sary complexity and compromising system performance to the point at which performance loss/economic loss litigation becomes likely. For example, it might be expected that at some stage operators will need to protect network performance by introducing pass/fail margins into conformance testing. This is valid and understandable but will highlight vendors who are presently shipping products that only meet conformance performance requirements under an unrealistically narrow range of operational conditions. Note that some devices can now take well over 1000 hours to go through conformance test - performance testing potentially takes longer. This is a cost that no one wants to absorb. This will result in an increase in litigation cost. 15.23 Engineering Economics This is the area most closely coupled to the spectrum allocation and auction process. Our contention here is that false policy objectives, specifically the maximisation of short-term gains for national treasuries over longer-term economic gains have resulted in spectrum sales that ignore the laws of physics. The problem is compounded by present standar