Actually the real problem with that article, if all you residents of the USA will forgive me for saying so, is that it's written by an American.

The "Morality Tale" at the end is the bit I'm specifically referring to. He's saying that the governmental process which standardised on GSM in Europe is inherently inferior to the free market of the USA which standardised on CDMA. Now, the wrongness inherent in that governmental process has come back to hurt them and they're having to come begging to a good old American company that's prepared to sell its technology to anyone. But we're not letting those cocky Europeans get our hard-earned knowledge, no way we're not, the free market is protecting itself by making sure that the experience is kept where it's needed most.

Now, play that back the other way around and think of it as the free market in Europe that happened to pick the VCR of the wireless phone world and is now being forced to come to heel and pay the royalties to a big American company. And this big American company, having dominated its own marketplace and by a combination of muscle and back-room deals, is now making sure that all other competitors are crippled by not knowing the best way to implement their networks. So ultimately they hope that everyone will be using Qualcomm everywhere because all the other competitors have been ground into the dust after making the mistakes in the process of implementation.

Gee, now where have I heard that story before? Damn, Internet Explorer has just crashed again, I'm going to have to reboot my Microsoft Windows PC.

Just my two cents worth (which is about 0.015 USD now...)

Have fun,

Paul

P.S. This is actually being written in Netscape on a Sun Solaris workstation. But you get the point...