THE biggest ever gamble on the introduction of a new technology;
an attempt to maintain growth in a maturing industry; or an
industrial-policy fiasco? The introduction of “third-generation”
(3G) mobile-phone networks around the world is all these things
and more. In 2000, at the height of the dotcom boom, mobile
operators around the world, but mainly in Europe, paid a total
of €109 billion (then $125 billion) for licences to build and
operate 3G networks, which offer higher performance and more
capacity than existing second-generation (2G) networks. In part,
the mobile operators were victims of their own hype. A report
that year from the International Telecommunication Union, the
industry's standards body, gives a sense of the high hopes for
3G:  The device will function as a phone, a computer, a
television, a pager, a videoconferencing centre, a newspaper, a
diary and even a credit will support not only voice
communications but also real-time video and full-scale
multimedia. It will automatically search the