Earth has been figuratively shrunken by the proliferation of Internet. Globalization is on full steam and the world wide web is providing inexhaustible fuel. The Internet fever has sparked an arms race of sorts, only instead of WMDs we now have companies racing to come up with the best platform for surfing, hardware for computing, and the best and fastest channels for Internet access. The Internet age is upon us and with this dawning of a new era, you'd have to wonder how the super powers of the old world are positioning themselves.

The west, bannered by Telecoms powerhouse o2, is spearheading the pact with the beasts from the east Japan, China, and India close at their heels. In fact, UK-based O2 and other companies spread all over Europe recently came up with what could be the future of mobile computing - a broadband-equipped, 3G fast mobile phone. Amidst all these mad dash though, one supreme first world country appears lost in the mix - the United States of America.

A Long Time Coming - Mobile Broadband
by Leon Erlanger

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). -- view complete article