Thanks for the great detail. You certainly have more background in radio part than myself. > American CDMA was not competitve with internationally used GSM (we

Thanks for the great detail. You certainly have more background in radio part than myself. > American CDMA was not competitve with internationally used GSM (well, no competition existed those days so America kept using it.) I worked with Voicestream DCS-1900 in 1996 or so. Yes, it was a GSM network. But on a commercial base I would not call it competition. They were a tiny little niche player. All the big one use "American" standards, and their networks were much less advanced than the nation-wide GSM networks in Europe at the time. Not being a radio engineer I am not 100% sure whether CDMA is really not such a good choice, but the commercially run networks certainly were significantly worse in my experience. The idea of standardization is that you have a wide range if interoperable network and terminal implementations. That was not something desired in the US. You could not just buy the best phone and use it in any network. Don't remember how it was on the infra side, but I somewhat doubt that it was easy to mix and match various vendors in the same network. Situation in the US started to change with T-Mobile and ATT using GSM, but that was many years later. I remember when going to IT conferences in the US 2002 - 2007 nearly all locals had feature phones. When I used my smartphone (SymbianOS of course at the time) they told me that's a completely useless gadget, all they wanted to do is make voice calls. Of course around 2010 things had changed completely.