A Long Time Coming - Mobile Broadband
(excerpt from Infoworld.com by Leon Erlanger - article in full)

Compared with Japan, Korea, and Europe, America’s mobile carriers have taken their time rolling out mobile broadband. The prime reason is the split in 2G digital mobile phone technologies among U.S. carriers, which has meant the networks needed to deploy their own new 3G equipment to cover the same service areas.
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Today, the major 2G camps are GSM (AT&T Wireless, Cingular, VoiceStream) and CDMA (Sprint, Verizon Wireless, others). Although primarily for voice, 2G also supports data transfer at speeds around 20Kbps, slow enough for most early customers to decide Internet access via mobile device wasn’t practical. Carriers introduced 2.5G data services approximately four years ago as a bridge to 3G. The GSM camp offered GPRS, at 30Kbps to 60Kbps, and then EDGE (Enhanced Data GSM Environment), at 75Kbps to 150Kbps; the CDMA camp rolled out CDMA 2000 1xRTT (One Times Radio Transmission Technology), at 30Kbps to 70Kbps -- all of which provide enough bandwidth for e-mail and modest Web surfing. The current major carriers -- Sprint (1xRTT), Verizon Wireless (1xRTT), Cingular (EDGE), and T-Mobile (EDGE) -- have close to nationwide availability for 2.5G service, and most 3G devices and services can fall back to 2.5G when 3G service is unavailable.

With 3G ramping up, the alphabet soup has grown even thicker. Although UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) was supposed to be the next step up from EDGE, both Cingular and T-Mobile are jumping to the higher-performance HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access), and CDMA vendors Sprint and Verizon Wireless have adopted a standard called EvDO (Evolution Data Optimized).

COMPLETE ARTICLE HERE:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/04/24/77295_17FE3gevo_1.html?s=feature