1) like all wireless technologies you need to have the same standard on both ends of the link (handset and base-station)

2) software upgradeable only means keep the same radio if the radio is capable of running the new software — this is almost never the case for handsets and seldom the case even for base-station radios (carriers don’t like to admit that they spend money on their networks to wall street, so they go along with this charade)

3) By the name of the technology, it sounds like you need multiple radios dedicated to EDGE to hit the top speeds, this means adding more radios to the site

4) support for higher speeds means better backhaul from the site, something carriers hate to spend money on

5) Each timeslot dedicated to EDGE requires transceiver resources at the base-station controller and these transceivers are damn expensive

To summarize:

1) people with existing EDGE devices will see no benefit from this technology — just like EVDO Rev A did nothing for the tens of millions of EVDO Rev 0 devices out there.

2) there is a good chance carriers won’t even deploy this technology (especially in the US), as aren’t they supposed to be saving their pennies for LTE (there was an upgrade to CDPD that was exactly like this and nobody bit on that because they had already moved on to GSM/GPRS)