Wireless consolidation

It's time for a lesson in wireless consolidation. Now stick with me folks because on a global basis, this is one of those most confusing issues.

Now first I'm going to draw the entire world. World is a big place and over here in this little corner of the world is South Korea and they are on a technology called CDMA for talking to each other on the cell phones.

Now in Europe, if you were coming from South Korea, they would be over here on a technology called GPRS and guess what? The two aren't compatible with each other, so if you're coming from here to here you can't talk to the folks in Europe.

Now in the US, we try to make things simpler or maybe more difficult. In U.S., we use CDMA. We also use GPRS and we also use another technology called iDEN. Now there is only one company providing iDEN technology and that was Nextel, and then on the GPRS network, we had companies like AT&T, Cingular and we also had T-mobile. T-mobile is a subsidiary of a European company. And lastly on the CDMA network, we had Verizon and Sprint.

Now if you were a Verizon or a Sprint user, then you could go over and talk to people in South Korea. How nice is that, but you would not be able to talk to people in Europe. That's a no-no. Don't try to take Verizon or Sprint phones into Europe and talk to people there. Likewise, people in Europe 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 and forth between US and Europe. However, you couldn't go to South Korea. How confusing is that?

Well, now what's happening is all of these guys are merging into one company, well, maybe not one company, but a few companies. For example, Sprint bought Nextel, well, that's pretty good news because they're going to pretty much dump all the Nextel technology and stay with Sprint. That means 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 US and all of the customers then can come over to Europe and they can wander around Europe and make calls there. Verizon, still pretty much on their own in negotiations now with MCI.

A lot of stuff to keep track of here if you're traveling around 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're going to.