The mud is starting to fly in the race to dominate the mobile internet. Members of a phone consortium - including BT -have been publicly bickering in Italy after failing to pick up a licence for "3G" (third generation) networks, which allow mobile telephone companies to offer access to the web.
The cost of running and building the new third generation networks has ballooned. Moody's, the credit-rating agency, said telecom companies will have to pay $270bn to roll out the new net phones. It is no wonder shareholders are getting nervous.
This week Switzerland cancelled its auction after two bidders merged. There are calls for a European commission investigation into alleged collusion between mobile companies involved in bidding.
The only winners appear to be the governments that auctioned off the airwaves. Germany raised £30bn while Gordon Brown squeezed £22.5bn from the likes of BT and Vodafone.
But to some the chancellor has made a serious mistake. According to Pekka Sivonen, chairman and founder of pioneering wireless internet specialist Digia, mobile companies will attempt to recoup their costs by forcing up prices.
Mr Sivonen is not easy to dismiss. In July Time magazine rated his firm as one of Europe's 50 hottest tech companies. In Finland, which has the highest usage rate of mobile phones in the world, the licences were given away free.
"[In Britain] mobile companies will produce a huge pile of services created specially for businessmen and targeted mainly at city centres, but the information society was intended for all citizens," Mr Sivonen says.
Far better, he argues, would be a system of so-called "beauty auctions" where governments choose firms according to their technical expertise. Some countries such as France have opted for that approach but others such as Britain, Germany, Italy (which raised £7.3bn) and the Netherlands (nearly £2bn) have tried to extract as much money as they can out of mobile operators.
"The UK government policy was criminal and short-sighted. It was just a short-term policy to raise money to build hospitals and roads and was a hidden tax," Mr Sivonen claims.
"Many users may never switch to 3G services because of governments' greed-driven policies and if the UK and German government had chosen another route there would be a greater variety of services." The loser is not just the consumer but Europe as a whole, which is frantically trying to catch up with the tech-driven United States.
"Europe is biting its own legs. We could have competed in wireless technologies where we are way ahead but I'm now afraid that we've missed our chance."
The recent farcical 3G auction in Italy where five firms ended up bidding for five licences and unsurprisingly ended up paying far less than the Italian government wanted, is a sign of things to come, he believes. "We're going to see a lot of similar auctions where a handful of companies pretty much agree how much they will pay between themselves."
Mr Sivonen is not alone. Kurt Hellstrom, the chief executive of Ericsson - the world's third largest makers of mobile phone handsets, said the fees being paid were too high. "It is clear that growth on the mobile market risks slowing as a consequence of the high [licence] charges," he said. "It's like petrol. It's clear that we consume less petrol with the high price."
Europe's 3G auction track record to date seems to back up the gloomy prognosis. The British and German governments raised billions more than they expected but in countries such as Italy and the Netherlands governments were left feeling cheated.
The fact is that mobile operators are simply not willing to fork out for a 3G licence any more, especially in relatively small European countries.
Switzerland and Belgium are still hoping to stage 3G auctions but firms are not queueing up to take part. Auctions in the Netherlands and Austria have fallen flat and it seems that the wallet-waving frenzy seen in Britain and Germany this year is at an end.
In Britain there were 13 bidders for five licences while in Germany fierce bidding saw the government raise more than five times what it expected.
Italy's 3G auction was the last big European sale but the auction process is likely to remain a source of controversy as governments launch investigations into alleged price collusion. Question marks continue to hang over sales in Italy, Austria, the Netherlands and even Germany and Britain, and some governments have asked the European commission to get involved.
Those countries which opted for the beauty contest route - namely France, Portugal, Spain, Norway and Finland - face no such embarrassing post mortems and are likely to enjoy far more sophisticated 3G services as a result.
