The dream of being able to radiopage someone anywhere in Europe is threatened by a disagreement between the operators and the manufacturers over how it should be achieved: operators and regulatory authorities, including British Telecom and the UK Department of Trade & Industry, want the frequencies to stay the same, and to use scanning pagers that run up and down the frequency spectrum until they pick up their call sign, where the manufacturers argue that such pagers will be cumbersome and expensive – haven’t they heard of applications-specific integrated circuits and the economies of volume production? – and that there should be just two frequencies, one national and one for international use.