s apparent market leverage could be translated into aggressive component price reduction and aggressive innovation. Actually, this proves not to be the case. Attempting to also deploy nonstandard technologies into these bands introduces additional risks and costs. The associated costs are incurred partly on the network side (base station costs) but predominantly get reflected in handset and user equipment costs both in terms of direct component cost, design risk, time to market risk and performance risk, all of which have additional cost and revenue-loss implications. An analysis of this can be found in the RTT Study RF Cost Economics for Handsets undertaken for the GSM Association in September 2007 and available as a free download, 1 but the following is a synopsis to avoid you having to read a 92 page document. The opening assumption is that there is an underlying and ongoing need to lower user device costs and provide a continuously improving user experience in terms of data rates and duty cycles and a parallel need to support multiple simultaneous data streams. The ongoing need for lower user device costs is debatable but let's go with it for the time being. Cost reduction in all consumer electronics products is typically achieved by realising higher levels of integration. However, RF functions have been traditionally difficult to integrate. For example, the higher power levels used in wide-area cellular systems make it problematic to place devices such as RF power amplifiers in close proximity to other RF and non-RF functions. RF devices do not scale in the same way as other devices and obey Ohms law rather than Moore's law. In terms of spectral policy making, it is assumed that future cellular phones will become increasingly frequency transparent, able to access multiple frequencies across multiple bands. However, this requirement is at odds with the parallel need to increase integration levels to achieve ever lower component and production cost targets. A more highly integrated phone does not necessarily m