On your entertaining idea that AT&T Wireless might have gone from the GSM global standard to iDEN, which is Motorola-only and hardly very popular – the trend even back in 2000 was that GSM was winning and gaining share against its smaller competitors including TDMA (D-AMPS), iDEN and CDMA. With the move from 3G to 4G, Verizon has now switched into the GSM camp and is adopting LTE (the evolution of the UMTS 3G standard), just like AT&T.

As in almost every technology market, there are network effects that drive GSM as the market share leader to gain more share – there are so many GSM phone vendors out there, shipping such high volumes, that the price, features and selection in GSM handsets is really superior to the competition.

Another interesting question is what would have happened if AT&T Wireless had actually acquired Nextel back in 2000. With only around 10M customers to support, the iDEN network was certainly in much better shape back then. Also, chances are that Motorola might have been able to persuade the combined company to go with some sort of iDEN evolution rather than GSM and AWS had the spectrum to do this comfortably in most markets. Without the loss iDEN, how much stronger would Motorola be today? Since the sticking point of the merger was to replace AWS management with Nextel’s superior group, chances are the combined company would have been doing quite well in 2003 and the Cingular merger would have never happened. Without that merger, what would “the new at&t” look like? Without the distraction of the Nextel merger, but the very real possibility that they could have bought Nextel’s 2.6 GHz spectrum from a disinterested AWS on the cheap, isn’t it likely that Sprint’s WiMAX network would have actually hit more inline with their original time table and scale or maybe even sooner and bigger?