Everybody knows the U.S. has historically been way behind the rest of the world when it comes to mobile wireless, right? Well, the U.S. may actually be leading in the race to 3G.
GSM fans will point out that GSM is more broadly deployed elsewhere in the world than IS-95. They’ll be careful not to point out the extent to which bribery played a role in that. (Things like “If you choose GSM over CDMA, we’ll build a factory there” which is how GSM mostly won in Brazil.)
But that kind of thing is ultimately self-defeating, and TDMA/GSM isn’t going to be competitive against CDMA2K, and the Europeans can’t make WCDMA work reliably.
This is a very informative and wonderfully-opinionated article on the technology, history and politics behind CDMA/CDMA2K and GSM/WCDMA. Link