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Actually, what I want worldwide compatibility.
The author can say what he will about Europe's, crap, the laws, etc, but the bottom line is that there was a continental, no, worldwide standard (GSM) for about 15 years now. If they hand't done something like that it would have been a mess and wireless phones would probabally not have taken off the way they did.
Obviously some things were done the wrong way. But they picked a standard, committed to it, and agreed to all deploy 1 compatible system (by making a law.) In restrospect that law should have had a 5 year expiration date or something to encorage/force the deployment of GSM, then get out of the way and allow for experimentation of new technology. At the time CDMA was considered an ambitious, unproven, plan and GSM was a sure thing.
Weather it's superior, inferior, or what, it worked, worked well, and worked most places.
That's why AT&T got stuck with TDMA. When they chose and committed to digital, that's the best thing they had at the time and just committed to it.
WCDMA, CDMA2K, I don't really care. I just want to use my phone when I travel. It seems like the way 3G deployment is going, there will be no worldwide compatible standard. We finally got so that quad band GSM phones are common, now we'll have to wait to start seing UMTS world phones.
And, lovedatreo, I believe 3G is defined as something like 600kbps download while moving or something like that. I don't remember exactly.
EV-DO (CDMA2000) and HSDPA (WCDMA) (in the US) are the only things truly 3G. Anything before that is 2.5G or whatever you want to call it. Don't mean to argue, just pointing out something I picked up a long the way.
As far as WCDMA goes. The handsets they're building now are HSDPA(or just UMTS) with GSM also. So these devices have both radios to work on both systems. Not the most efficient but it does allow you to use 3G or GSM whever you have wich.
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