Across the world, phones are ringing in empty offices. From America to Zambia, the secretaries are saying sorry, everyone's in an all-month meeting. The worshipful worldwide community of governmental radio authorities has upped sticks and vanished to Geneva for the World Radiocommunications Conference 2003.
The WRC happens every three to four years, and it always shakes the planet. It's where the world decides how to use the radio spectrum -- that unique universal resource which refuses to obey national borders. For nearly a hundred years since the first International Radiotelegraphy Conference in 1906, it's been the keeper of the Radio Regulations, the global agreements that say who can transmit what and where. At first, it was just ships and Morse code, then broadcast radio and television, then satellites. Now, with an increasing amount of global commerce dependent on mobile phone technology, wireless Internet and other data services, the WRC has assumed a new and central importance.
The number of things to be decided beggars belief. Some people want to run wideband data networks over tethered balloons or aircraft in tight orbits over cities: are these terrestrial or satellite services? Which frequency band should they use? Suddenly every airline in the world wants to provide broadband Internet access at 35,000 feet; the environmental groups need more satellite-based radar systems to watch river and forest changes; and new wireless LAN frequencies in one country interfere with military radars in another. WRC-03 has to decide all this, as well as how to implement digital broadcasting on shortwave, whether to remove the international requirement for radio hams to know Morse code for long distance bands, and a thousand competing wishes for satellite use. Everyone wants a slice of the radio cake.
One of the most exciting ideas under discussion is a new satellite system to bring broadband to those parts of the world bereft of high-speed bits. The WRC-03 takes its responsibilities to developing countries seriously: it's noticed that access to networks is a fantastic tool for national development but one that tends to favour countries that are already rich. Was ever thus, of course, but satellites are a great way to get millions of people within reach of the Net in double-quick time.
To date, public access satellite systems have had a lamentable record: names such as GlobalStar, ICO and Teledesic are known today not for their globe-spanning networks of orbiting hardware, but for the way they burned through money as if it were rocket fuel. The only systems that actually run are Globalstar and Iridium, both just about surviving fiscal near-death experiences as shadows of their planned selves. It's unlikely that any commercial endeavour will build a successful global network for broadband: if even Teledesic, with the backing of the Saudis and Bill Gates, can't afford to make it work, who can?
We already have two examples of global networks that are bigger than any single company could build: the Internet and the GSM mobile phone system. They're quite different in many ways, but open standards, interoperability, multiple service providers and multiple equipment suppliers are key to both. Where GSM is even more impressive than the Internet is in the way that it has persuaded almost every country in the world to adopt the same radio standard and a multiplicity of phone companies: for most of the 20th century, a country wasn't a real, manly nation unless it had a single state telco and a jealously guarded radio spectrum. But there's nothing like a nice wedge to encourage liberalisation, once it became clear that selling licences to commercial GSM providers brought in serious dosh, objections faded and the handsets rolled in.
Here's the key to the WRC vision: a unified framework of radio standards tied to a guaranteed way for states to get their cut of the action; a multiplicity of suppliers tied to an open market. The users will be able to buy any terminal equipment and use it with any of the service providers in orbit, and any service provider can get a cut of the global action without having to roll out an entire constellation of satellites. GSM in orbit, GIO would bring broadband Internet access at low cost to every inch of the globe that's currently out of reach of existing providers. It's not really called GIO -- it's not called anything yet -- and it won't use the same standards as GSM, but the basic ideas are the same. And it won't just be the developing countries that benefit: with vast swathes of Europe still out of range of DSL or cable, such a system will be as welcome in Surrey as in Siberia.
Sounds good. But GSM's success also relied on another, unstated factor: the Americans didn't know it was there. While Europe was setting up, America was busy creating a patchwork of commercial cellular fiefdoms. Lack of roaming and a plethora of standards held the American wireless landscape back, while the Not Invented Here syndrome kept GSM off the radar. You can bet your bottom dollar that if the big American service and equipment suppliers knew in the 1980s what they know now, the American government would have done everything in its power to nobble GSM in its cradle instead of letting it grow into the preferred standard in 197 countries.
America remains aloof. It's the only major market not to adopt the DAB digital radio standards, preferring instead to have its own mishmash of incompatible options. Digital television is similarly miles behind Europe. The European effort to build our own satellite positioning system, Galileo, has met with opposition from the States at the very highest level. In all these examples and in so many more, America has a simple policy that overrides technical, economic or geopolitical issues: my way or no way. Look at the mess of 3G's multiple standards.
America, of course, has by far the biggest delegation at WRC-03; nearly 200 delegates topped off by a real ambassador. It also has many rich and influential telcos, who have only bad memories of GSM and who will consider themselves likely to be losers if a true international universal open market in broadband opens up. Zambia -- well, I don't know how many people from Zambia are at WRC-03, but I know they'd get far more from GIO than the Americans would ever lose. Not that the Americans need lose anything: the country that gave the world the Internet has nothing to fear from open innovation.
In the end, it boils down to enlightenment and the realisation that dogma and dug-in interests are their own worst enemies. Here's hoping that the next report from WRC-03 is something really worth broadcasting.
