WHEN I was a child in the 1940s, we had one radio in our home but no record player or TV. But today, radios are readily available as well as stereos, TV and computers.

One of the biggest changes over the past five years has been not the number of receivers but the number of radio transmitters. Among the many that I have inherited, purchased and installed, I can list a remote-controlled garage door, security system, car keys, weather monitors, door bells, mobile and cordless phones, walkie-talkies, intercoms, microwave oven, remote controls for various toys, and wireless LAN (local area network).

Until now, it has been sufficient for countries to agree the spectrum allocations for broadcast, amateur and emergency services, remote control and telemetry devices, cordless and mobile phones in a series of bands up to about 30GHz (gigahertz). For the most part, interference is avoided by allocating frequencies separated in the same way as the different channels on your FM radio.

Due to the import of devices from many different countries and the widespread adoption of microwave ovens and other items, there are now many less than obvious violations. So what happens? Well, suppose one of your trusted devices on which you are now completely dependent suddenly stops working. It comes as a bit of a shock, but even more worrying is our inability to rationalise and decode what has gone wrong. All you know is that things do not work.

I think this problem is going to accelerate over the next ten to 20 years as increasing numbers of our everyday objects go online - the bar codes, the plastic cards and so on. It is imperative that we start thinking about solutions to this problem and engineer technology to cope.

Rather than carving the frequency space into convenient channels, everyone can use exactly the same space with the desired signals decoded by something equivalent to an electronic sieve at the receiver. A transmitter sends a signal spanning all frequencies. Electronic filtering allows the desired signal to be selected from millions of unwanted transmissions.

Probably the easiest way to understand this concept is to think in terms of thousands of micro-radio channel broadcasts in parallel, all at the same time, but all on different time relationships that can only be unscrambled by knowledge that is embedded in the receiver. This "spread spectrum" system is the technology of future generation mobile phones, and probably the ideal mode for an ever more complex future.

The most significant change this technology will invoke is the disassembly of the radio spectrum regulatory authorities in terms of allocating frequencies.

For us, as users, the big breakthrough will be an interference-free future and an unrestricted ability to communicate. The ether was given to mankind, and only governments could think of taxing us for its use. This resembles a very old world that included taxes on fireplaces and windows, so I hope radio frequency taxes will go the same way.