I have looked into this issue a good bit and the current state of affairs is that you have 4 technologies in use CDMA, GSM, Wimax and IDEN and 4 top tier carriers. Of those, Verizon and Sprint run CDMA, but by virtue of the acquisition of Nextel, Sprint also runs IDEN but seems to be mostly pushing that through their Boost Mobile subsidiarity (Southern Linc by The Southern Co also uses IDEN). AT&T and T Mobile run GSM. Verizon has always had the best coverage out in the boonies, but you pay for it in higher costs.<div>
However in the relatively near future the situation will change,I think, for the better. Both Verizon and AT&T are switching to LTE which is like 50x faster than EVDO (Verizon will be ahead of AT&T by a year or more in the roll out). As I understand, LTE handsets will fall back to GSM as necessary so worldwide portability should be possible with Verizon with a year or two. Sprint is running Wimax phones for g4 but not sure how they intend to go forward. Why would they continue to support 3 different technologies? Last I looked, T Mobile is doing some funky 3.5 technology instead of going with a 4g technology like LTE. If LTE is all it is cracked up to be, it seems they will be forced to switch too, but they would likely then be a few years behind AT&T.</div>
<div>Then there are the 2nd tier companies that lease time from the big guys and resell it. They seem mostly to run on the Sprint network (Virgin, Metro, Boost), or Verizon (Page Plus) or AT&T.</div><div><br></div><div>
GC</div><div><br></div><div><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Nov 28, 2010 at 8:29 AM, Mike Harrison <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:cluon@geeklabs.com">cluon@geeklabs.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
<div class="im">> Off the top of your head, is N900 able to work on Sprint - or would<br>
> I need to switch carriers?<br>
<br>
</div>Last I checked.. Sprint is strictly CDMA ala Verizon.<br>
<br>
I travel outside the USA a lot,<br>
so GSM is a far superior option for me.<br>
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