Scott is that because our telephone ( Land line) system is in better shape and more extensive than much of the world, say Mexico, Caribean, India and thus its cheaper and more efficient for a guy in Gunajuato Mexico to use a cell phone?
Nope. has nothing to do with our land line system.
I am speaking about the wireless part of our cellular choices.
In the beginning there was AMPS, ETACS and NMT and the telco gods said it was good. In the US we adopted AMPS. In Europe there was ETACS, NMT-900, NMT-450 and a small German standard that I cannot even remember. With each country having its own spectrum and different systems the ability to roam was non-existent.
Europe decided that for their 2nd generation (2g) cellular to unify the spectrum, from that also grew a decision to make 2G digital and from that GSM was formed.
Meanwhile in the US bandwidth and capacity is what was needed. The pathway was to go digital with a TDMA air interface. But a small company, mostly involved with government communications had another digital technology called CDMA that they wanted to push into the cellular market. The FCC decided that it would be best to let the market decide what technology to use. The FCC freed up some spectrum in the PCS bands (1.9GHz) and then issued licenses. TDMA and CDMA duked it out, only uniting to prevent GSM from becoming dominate.
In the end Cingular (now AT&T) went TDMA, Airtouch, Bell Atlantic, NYNEX (now Verizon) went CDMA. Sprint came into the mix and seriously considered something called N-AMPS and TDMA but decided upon CDMA after playing with the other technologies. As a side not the capacity gain of the US TDMA was exactly the same as the N-AMPS analog technology. CDMA was promising a 40x increase which actually turned out to be about a 7x increase in reality.
While all this was happening Asia was booming. Japan, owing to its protectionist trade policies, was still using a homegrown cellular system call J-TACS. It never was adopted by anyone. The Japanese were not too welcomed in Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, etc. Lots of hurt feelings over the conquest that had happened in the 1930/40's.
So Asia started looking at AMPS, ETACS and eventually GSM. The GSM came to be dominate for a few factors. First lots of equipment choices from Ericson, Nokia, Motorola, etc. made it cheaper than CDMA/TDMA. Plus Asia had the same roaming issues as Europe. The GSM system itself handled roaming better than the IS41 system that TDMA and CDMA used, it was optimized for international dialing plans. The network for TDMA and CDMA basically was set up for North American dialing plans. GSM also used sim cards which made device management and sales easier. The Asians did not want to manage the sale of devices like in the US. They wanted to invest money in their networks not the subscriber equipment. In the US a typical operator has more capital money wrapped up in mobile phone subsidies than they do in network equipment.
The result is that GSM was just about everywhere but the US. Then 3G talks started up.
By this time it became apparent that TDMA was the technological loser. Cingular was merging with AT&T Wireless and converting systems to GSM. CDMA was being evolved to CDMA 1x and 3x (never deployed) while GSM was adding all kinds of new capabilities, GPRS, EDGE, and then UMTS. A huge sale of spectrum in Europe for 3G happened and drained the coffers of many a company but it locked in UMTS as a technology. There was a road map to upgrade one's GSM networks to UMTS. Anyone on CDMA would have a path to 1x but would have to rip everything out to go to UMTS. This effectively kept the US an island.
The change to getting the US to no longer be an island is happening with 4G. The two main 4G technologies are WiMAX and LTE.
WiMAX is already commercial. Mostly to companies with new spectrum best used for a TDD system. Clearwire is the company in the US. With its partners Sprint and Comcast you are seeing service offerings. The other technology is an evolution of UMTS called LTE. Verizon is very much interested in that and will deploy later this year as is T-Mobile.
It is a long story and I am sure I missed a few details of the 20+ year story of cellular. But I think you get the picture.
