It's time for a lesson in wireless consolidation. Now stickwith me folks because on a global basis, this is one of those most confusingissues.
Now first I'm going to draw the entire world. World is a bigplace and over here in this little corner of the world is South Korea and theyare on a technology called CDMA for talking to each other on the cell phones.
Now in Europe, if you were coming from South Korea, theywould be over here on a technology called GPRS and guess what? The two aren't compatiblewith each other, so if you're coming from here to here you can't talk to thefolks in Europe.
Now in the US, we try to make things simpler or maybe moredifficult. In U.S., we use CDMA. We also use GPRS and we also use anothertechnology called iDEN. Now there is only one company providing iDEN technologyand that was Nextel, and then on the GPRS network, we had companies likeAT&T, Cingular and we also had T-mobile. T-mobile is a subsidiary of aEuropean company. And lastly on the CDMA network, we had Verizon and Sprint.
Now if you were a Verizon or a Sprint user, then you couldgo over and talk to people in South Korea. How nice is that, but you would notbe able to talk to people in Europe. That's a no-no. Don't try to take Verizonor Sprint phones into Europe and talk to people there. Likewise, people inEurope couldn't come and talk to you. However, if you were on the AT&T,Cingular or T-mobile based networks, GPRS, then you could roam freely back andforth between US and Europe. However, you couldn't go to South Korea. Howconfusing is that?
Well, now what's happening is all of these guys are merginginto one company, well, maybe not one company, but a few companies. Forexample, Sprint bought Nextel, well, that's pretty good news because they'regoing to pretty much dump all the Nextel technology and stay with Sprint. Thatmeans if you're a Nextel user and you couldn't roam anywhere. Now you can.AT&T, Cingular mobile, well, there was actually a merger in that space too.AT&T merged with Cingular, so now there's only 2 GPRS providers in the USand all of the customers then can come over to Europe and they can wanderaround Europe and make calls there. Verizon, still pretty much on their own innegotiations now with MCI.
A lot of stuff to keep track of here if you're travelingaround the world. Fine print here is, wherever you're going, coverage matters.Make sure you buy the technology that's going to work in the place that you'regoing to.
