The value of a communications network increases rapidly as more people are connected. The general economy benefits from reduced transaction costs and improved access to commercial and social services. Robert Metcalfe coined the phrase "network effect" to describe such phenomena in the 1970s. More recently, the Harvard economist Robert Jensen has drawn attention to the benefits of mobile communications with his study of fishermen off the coast of northern Kerala, in the south of India.

Such widely recognized benefits primarily arise from providing interoperable and low-cost ubiquitous access to services across the whole population. In practice, this requires equipment and service standardization and access to globally and locally harmonized spectrum with interference protection.

Harmonized spectrum arrangements and coordinated regulatory conditions are the cornerstones of efficient spectrum use. This means the regulatory conditions need to be coordinated in recognized international forums and aligned with the global market to ensure economies of scale.

Regulatory frameworks determine the parameters of the telecom business for many years and must therefore be able to cope with market changes. Stable and predictable regulations are important prerequisites for the significant investments necessary to deploy mobile infrastructure and services today.

In first-generation mobile technology, North America, and the US in particular, focused on a common AMPS standard. Europe experienced comparatively slow growth as three standards - NMT, TACS and CNET - vied for investment and attention. In the subsequent generations of mobile technology, Europe focused on the GSM and then WCDMA standards.

Now nearly 2.5 billion people worldwide have GSM/WCDMA subscriptions. It is predicted that there will be about 4 billion mobile subscriptions worldwide by the end of 2011, and the vast majority of these subscribers will communicate via this 3GPP family of standards, including data connectivity in the form of EDGE and HSPA.

This unparalleled economy of scale favors 3GPP standards and has created a large, evolving ecosystem of suppliers, vendors, inter- and intra-related services and service providers around the world. Their focus isn't only on mobile terminals or systems, but also includes personal consumer devices such as notebooks, ultra-mobile PCs, cameras, portable game consoles and music players.

This 3GPP family of standards has undergone continuous evolution and improvement since its introduction in 1991 - with a 1000-fold increase in peak data rates in the past few years. It is worth noting that consecutive releases of the 3GPP standards have all been backwards compatible with earlier releases.

For operators and most subscribers, technology choices today will influence operations and service availability for years to come. It pays to choose wisely.