"Anti-Competitive" Measures to Improve the Wireless Industry

Wireless is one of the few industries that relies on a natural resource - spectrum - a resource which has been sold off to the highest bidder without any direct benefit to the industry. Such constrained industries need to be carefully planned and managed and competition has to be correctly channelled. In the early days of mains power distribution, competition resulted in a plethora of uncoordinated supply networks operating at different voltages, and at DC or various AC frequencies. In the UK it took two "anti-competitive" visionary measures to create the high performance national grid we know today. The first was to agree the frequency and voltage to enable the creation of a grid and the second was to nationalize the generating companies to create economies of scale. At the time both initiatives were strongly opposed y the industry - but who would turn the clock back now? 

This talk will propose moving towards the kinds of centrally managed infrastructure that is de-riguer for other industries based on limited natural resources such as water and power, freeing the rest of us up to focus on efficient and innovative device development and end user applications.