Quite a few years ago I attended a conference about Digital Broadcasting and the big topic at the time was the availability of radio frequencies or spectrum in most of the countries in Europe.

This was quite an eye-opener as most of the delegates were from continental European countries who have particular problems with spectrum and the biggest reason for deploying digital broadcasting technologies was to allow more services to be delivered using less frequency ranges.

Think about it, in a nation you would have radio frequencies taken up by radio broadcasters, emergency services, amateur radios, television channels, data transmissions, satellite services, mobile phones, army, navy, the air-force, civilian air traffic, radar, paging systems,  two-way radios, cordless phones, natural background emissions to name but a few. Each frequency range would have to have a buffer zone to prevent the signal interfering with other transmissions close to them both geographically and in the radio band.

Then think that unless nations had worked together and coordinated their respective radio frequency policies (and they haven't!) each country would have different frequencies allocated to each application. If these two countries shared a land border and, of course, in central Europe they often do, radio frequencies become very scarce, very quickly.

In Ireland we only have one land border. Otherwise we are tucked away in the middle of a lot of water. This makes our radio frequencies much less crowded than most other European countries, particularly Eastern European (Russia has very different policies on radio frequencies than Western Europe making many more problems for those countries caught between the two).

Comreg woke up to this back in 2005 and started promoting Ireland as the place to develop wireless technologies because Ireland is one of the few developed countries that isn't irradiated already and promised to fast-track applications associated with R&D activities.

This is clever as testing and developing wireless technologies in other countries is a much more long-winded and expensive affair mostly taken up with the bureaucracy involved in obtaining some spectrum that isn't likely to crash airplanes, interfere with Mrs Jones watching Eastenders or cause World War Three.