Wireless, but Leashed [telecom]

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Forgive me if I've got this wrong, but it seems fairly obvious "why this didn't happen sooner". The US has a track record of not adopting various international technology standards preferring to let private companies go their own way - usually, it seems - to grasp a short-term advantage when a technology evolves rather than be a little more patient and adopt an agreed system.

Great for the company that gets their first, and also for the dogma of allowing "free enterprise" to control things, but as we see there are downsides.

Not just that (and not just in Europe), it also makes a lot of sense to have one standard technology platform to reduce costs and have common skill-sets available over a larger market.

Reminds me of the debacle in the US with stereo AM broadcast radio. Three competing systems, each compatible with standard monaural AM, but incompatible with each other. The FCC decided to not choose a standard, but to let the three systems fight it out in the marketplace. No system got enough traction with the public to emerge on top, and so now there's almost no stereo AM.

Dick

This is a HUGE pet peeve of mine. I'm as libertarian and laissez-faire as anyone, but there are times when it's appropriate for the government to mandate a standard. I would've voted for Reagan had I been old enough, but his FCC killed AM stereo with their decision to let the market decide.

Whenever I complain about our lack of a cell phone standard in the US I hear, "that's because we have freedom". Uh, no we don't. In Europe handset manufacturers, wireless companies, and governments put their heads together and created a standard. Consumers have more freedom than we have here. And are we any less free because the government forces us to drive on the right? Are we less free because wifi is a standard? Or television channels? What if we needed four different television sets for Fox, NBC, ABC, and CBS? Without standards radio and television would never have gotten off the ground.

I think we've lost the ability to think critically in this country. Too often I come across binary thinking. Things either have to be

100% government controlled or 100% free-market controlled. Reality isn't like this. I think the VHS/Betamax and HD-DVD/BluRay battles were best left to the marketplace. But infrastructure decisions I believe we need a national consensus and a single standard. But somehow this equates to socialism.

John

Format battles aside, I wonder if there was actually real demand for stereo AM. I am young enough that I don't remember a time that FM radio wasn't available as an option (if not standard) in new cars, home receivers, boomboxes, even pocket radios and as a result, I have never enjoyed listening to music on AM radio because I found the quality inferior. As the Wikipedia article on FM broadcasting notes, station owners must have felt likewise because music stations seem to have migrated to FM, leaving the AM band for news, talk radio, etc. My point? By the time that I had heard of AM stereo I didn't see any need for it and I suspect that I was not alone.