t during a period in which return on investment was largely an unknown quantity. Over the past thirty years this has changed substantially and regulatory powers now ex- tend across pricing, service quality and increasingly social and environmental responsibility, potentially the first step towards more universal service obligations. This is in some ways an understandable response to a profitable industry enjoying revenue growth that significantly outpaced increases in operational cost. Whether this will continue to be the case depends on future technology and engineering innovation. There is also arguably a need for a closer coupling of standards and regulatory policy across previously separate technology sectors. The transition to digital technologies both in terms of the mechanisms used to encode and decode voice, image and data, the storage of that information and the transmission of that information across a communications channel has resulted in a degree of technology convergence that has not as yet been fully realised as commercial opportunity or reflected adequately in the standards and regulatory domain. For example, the same encoding and decoding schemes are used irrespective of whether the end product is moved across a two-way radio network, a cellular network, a broadcast Introduction network, a geostationary or medium or low-earth orbit network and/or across cable, copper of fibre terrestrial networks. Similarly cable, copper, fibre and all forms of wireless commu- nication increasingly use common multiplexing methods that get information onto the carrier using a mix of orthogonal³ or semiorthogonal phase, amplitude- and frequency-modulation techniques. 1.6 Technology Convergence as a Precursor of Market Convergence? Despite the scale of this technology convergence, these industry sectors remain singularly independent of each other despite being increasingly interdependent. This is a curious anomaly, probably best explained by the observation that commercial exigency drives commercial convergence rath