Smart radio's pioneers, Tellabs Wireless, confirmed that their base station's costs will fall rapidly even as its capacity surges, thanks to rapid advances in digital signal processors from companies like Texas Instruments. Qualcomm, Motorola, Lucent, NEC and others demonstrated successful CDMA implementations that point definitively towards a future with low-interference operators freely sharing broadband frequencies, rather than high-interference operators blasting everyone else off their exclusive narrowband allocations. Years after Gilder and others first identified these crucial technological trends and predicted their eventual dominance in communications, visitors like Carlos Ruiz Sacristan, Secretary of Communications and Transport (SCT), could actually hold them in their hands and make telephone calls, as he did at Motorola's EXPO COMM booth.

Unfortunately, the SCT and Cofetel seem organizationally incapable of capitalizing on Gilder's formidable skills in bringing the future into focus. Operators and manufacturers were unanimous in saying that Mexico's regulations lag far behind today's technological possibilities, despite Mexico's formidable advances in telecommunications legislation. Indeed, Mexico's regulators failed to announce any dates at the show for the auctions they've already committed to hold, much less any far-reaching commitments to open spectrum and order handsets so leading companies can begin to plan to implement their smart radio cellular technologies in Mexico first and thereby turn this nation into the world's telecomputing leader.

Mexico's authorities and operators still seem wrapped up in such old moot debates as TDMA and GSM versus CDMA and broadband, rather than just accepting the clear writing on the technological wall and moving on to such pressing questions as how to wind down the high-cost maintenance infrastructure for all the Telmex copper lines that don't terminate in homes and workplaces with immediate prospects to upgrade to high-capacity digital services. (If Telmex executives are foxy enough, they might even find a willing buyer for that industrial-age infrastructure; NYNEX might be a candidate, since their executives' heads are still so Bell-shaped that they're pulling new copper twisted pairs in Thailand's countryside, of all places).

The News' readers should hope that the next meeting that convenes regulators, legislators, operators, manufacturers, and public representatives can avoid the evident vice of last fall's Cancun meeting: looking at the future through a rear view mirror. The next meeting should focus several years out, using guides like Gilder to outline the possible, and then assemble teams to address all the nitty-gritty issues from prosaic depreciation schedules (companies should expense digital-age equipment on their tax forms) to glamorous spectrum allocations (regulators should make them as open to the public as Mexico's beaches).

The benefits of opening an Internet window for every Mexican schoolchild are manifold and manifest, but other benefits will also flow out of that far-sighted planning. For example, the sooner Mexico's lawyers can agree to drop the Spanish viceroy's pre- industrial insistence on "original documents" for all transactions, the sooner code- signature electronic documents like faxes, email, and webpages can replace all the wasteful messenger trips that contribute so much to Mexico City's pollution problem by clogging its streets and public transit moving little pieces of paper about for signatures.

Readers with questions or comments for Dr. White can call 011(525)595-6045, fax 011(525)683-5874, or email white@profmexis.sar.net

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