Chapter 17
Agreements, Standards, Policies, and Regulations
We live in a world where many businesses and organizations provide a wide variety of goods and services. The goods and services provided by a particular business may be affected by, or may depend on, the goods and services provided by another business. Thus, agreements are needed between these businesses for mutual benefit.
We also live in a world where there are many ways that technologies can be put together into a system that does something useful. Having a standard way of putting these technologies together can result in various benefits, such as economies of scale, interoperability between equipment from different vendors, ability to roam from system to system and still communicate, and so on. Standards are a good way to make this happen. Economies of scale and interoperability notwithstanding, there is still room for choices regarding how technology is deployed. Thus, choices need to be made, and policies emerge to guide the decision making on issues such as the level of security to provide in a network and how subscribers will be billed for various services.
We also live in a world with “social contracts” where governments can plan, mandate, and administer certain choices and policies for the common good. Regulations are rules that are mandated by a government agency (e.g., on the use of unlicensed bands).
Agreements, standards, policies, and regulations are part of the structure that guides and determines how ...
