There is plenty of arbitary and secret activities going 'round on Wikipedia.
Sure, there may well be. But when people are banned the reasons are available for all to see. They were in this case. Why did El Reg not publish the fact that the supposed "victim" in this case was actually banned for sock-puppetry?
Its hard to say whether or not the bans were unfair when the rational for doing them are done on secret mailing lists.
That doesn't appear to be the case. User:WordBomb shows a reason and links to criteria that appears to me to be reasonable. El Reg managed to avoid pointing out that WordBomb had been banned for sock-puppetry.
The poster I responded to wrote in such a way to say "Well, Jimbo says the reasons were fair, so they were,"
No, I didn't, that's clearly a lie as by the time you wrote the above I'd already responded to your comment. I originally said Wales appears to be acting in good faith after quoting lines from the hit-job El Reg has written on him that actually prove the case. The story suggests that a secretive Wikipedia cabal censored WordBomb. There's nothing apparently secret about it, the alleged "cabal"'s de-facto leader is clearly acting in good faith, so the story is dubious.
The reasons for the IP block ban are explained but not the user bans. The user bans are, ultimately, more interesting as they target specific actions by named individuals.
Actually, no I didn't. I said that Jimbo Wales appears to be acting on good faith, based upon what was written. Given he oversees Wikipedia, it's hard for me not to take that into account, especially given the lack of factual information in the El Reg article.
El Reg has given "undue weight" to someone who has a problem with stock shorting and is finding it hard to convince Wikipedia to incorporate their opinions on stock shorting and Overstock.com into related articles. Either Wikipedia's admins are acting in bad faith or they're not. What Wales is doing is certainly relevant to that discussion. Wales is apparently acting in good faith. That suggests to me that the Wikipedia admins he's watching over are doing so too.
It's notable{{cn}} (heh) that, reading between the lines, Jimbo Wales is actually pretty convinced that those editing the articles concerned in the way described and banned for the fact are acting in bad faith.
Ainsworth has contributed more featured articles to Wikipedia than all but six other writers. But in October, when he attempted to edit the Weiss article, he was immediately banned from the site for 24 hours by an administrator known as "Durova" - the administrator at the heart of the secret mailing list scandal.
And Durova's ban was seconded by none other than Jimmy Wales.
"Durova [has] my full support here. No nonsense, zero tolerance, shoot on sight," Wales wrote on the site. "No kidding, this has gone on long enough."
and
Without a doubt, Judd Bagley has seriously angered the powers that be at Wikipedia. He's even received an email from Jimbo Wales saying: "Your feigned innocence is not very endearing" and "It would be helpful if you could come to terms with the fact that you have behaved very very badly over a long period of time."
Not exactly evidence of a cabal acting in secret. More evidence of a group of people behaving trollishly and being banned for doing so.
Indeed, looking at the original sequence of events that supposedly set this off:
Bagley restored the link to Businessjive. A few hours later, the same person removed it. So Bagley restored it again. And it was removed again.
it looks like the whole thing was set off because of link-spamming from the supposed "victims" in this case.
The Register doesn't give us enough information to actually tell if this is the case or if there's some other reason. It doesn't report in full what was said by anyone proposing bans on the so-called victims. It portrays the events as arbitrary despite the fact that, actually, these things don't go on in secret. Most telling of all, if Wikipedia's admins were banning people without presenting reasons for doing so, this would be newsworthy which means the fact they're not saying no reasons were given is itself telling.
Very poor from El Reg. There may be a story right there, but anyone familiar with Wikipedia who's capable of reading between the lines is going to give a big "WTF" and assume El Reg is making up controversy where none exists.
If it were anyone but Ron Paul then I'd say yes. But Ron Paul isn't someone anyone in the political establishment really believes has any chance of winning. So why risk the chance of being caught setting such a smear campaign up to discredit a candidate who poses no real threat to begin with?
The likely culprits are people with no connection to either Ron Paul's campaign or any of his opponents. Either an over-enthusiastic supporter, or else someone with a chip on his shoulder about Ron Paul who wants to make him look bad. And I'm only considering the latter possibility because the "Well, Ron Paul voted against this, unlike everyone else, so he must be a great President!" phenomenon certainly annoys the crap out of me, and I'd imagine it does the same for others.
Have you tried a peaceful alternative? Since getting the Rabbids 2 game, my wife and I, whenever we're really, really, angry, just go to the Wii, shake the controller as hard and quickly as possible, and destroy Paris with the resultant burps.
Wait, no, that's destructive too. Does burping count as violence if it's destructive? Or, say, if you've eaten Thai food?
You know, I think I might just start an ISP if the MPAA is throwing a few hundred million to all who ask. Do I need to have any customers to qualify?
Coming soon: SquiggleNET. 768Kbps down/64Kbps up for just $99 a week. Guaranteed no more than 1,000,000:1 contention. Five nines reliability (0.0099999% has five nines in it right?)
You know, it's been a week or so, and we still don't really know the reasons for the firing. All of the rumors about a bad review are just that - rumors. Gamespot is, of course, denying that the firing had anything to do with the review in question, or complaints from the advertiser.
It's not civil disobedience unless you make every effort to ensure you will be prosecuted for breaking the law. If you break the law with no expectation of being caught or prosecuted then you're just breaking the law. You can't make a political protest in secret, it's a contradiction in terms.
Steve Jobs will get some of the money. The question is whether Apple will. Jobs has fingers in both pies, being a major shareholder in Disney and being CEO of Apple.
LTE is an evolution of the GSM family. UMTS was a refactoring with GSM's protocols being layered to run over a CDMA air interface. UMTS is now being refactored further so the high level protocols (voice and messaging services) can run over the Internet (IMS), and the CDMA (W-CDMA) stuff is being ripped out (as it should be) and replaced by a WiMAX-like interface. The two groups of layers still use GSM SIM cards etc so an integrated "phone" device can still be made, and they still use a GSM model of the subscriber-terminal-network relationship.
Saying they're radically different is technically true on one level, but that doesn't mean LTE isn't part of the same family. The 80386 and the Intel Core Duo are radically different too, but you'd still describe the latter as an "ix86 family" CPU.
The best part is the stupid CDMA crap is finally being ditched. CDMA was a nice experiment, but it should never have made its way into production cellular technology. The fact the 3GPP went for it showed the power of marketing can destroy the ability of any group of people to make rational decisions.
Given that the blown up sentence was, actually, the entire body of the comment, yes, you should have looked at it. The link was an extra, not even clickable, and barely related to the OP's point.
The OP was just wrong. Giving a URL of an interesting but barely on-topic article doesn't change that, and I'm surprised you feel the need to insult people who disagree with the notion that a comment that's 100% wrong is worthy of modding up.
It invalidates the parent's (your) post because the your post claimed that the OP was insightful.
The OP was claiming that Verizon "just blew up the US cell phone industry". Verizon has done no such thing. Verizon has jumped onto a pre-existing bandwagon.
I did read the article the OP posted, it doesn't change the fact that the major claim made by the OP was false. The article linked to does not in any way support the OP's claim. If I claim that God is a 7' Chinese Woman living in the Seattle Space Needle and then link to the best article ever written about the Space Needle, are you going to claim I should be modded "insightful" too?
If you mean that "Pip pip pip" thing that happens when a GSM phone has to negotiate a connection to the network, no, because we're talking about 4G GSM, which uses an entirely different air interface technology to 2G GSM, which is the only version of GSM that has this particular issue.
It's not insightful because Verizon isn't doing anything that AT&T, T-Mobile, and the entire European Mobile phone industry, hasn't been doing for decades.
Verizon has been a hold-out trying to buck the trend, together with a small but loud bunch of Qualcomm influenced US operators. They're not building the bandwagon, they're trying to jump on board.
So you bought a device that's locked to a particular network and uses an only partially open protocol stack to an open network running an entirely different protocol. And it didn't work.
I assume you think TEH INTERNETS is closed too, because the AppleTalk network stack on your Mac 128k doesn't work on it either.
That's assuming that really is a huge revenue stream, fully justifying the amount they're spending on locking down every phone they sell - the programming, the tech support, the lost custom, etc.
It almost certainly doesn't. They can still sell ring-tones even without locking down every phone in existence, they'll just sell less of them. How much less? Probably not so much less that it suddenly justifies the costs of the locking down.
T-Mobile and AT&T both, today, run open networks. 100% open networks. You can buy a GSM phone from anyone, and as long as it supports the same frequencies these operators run on, the phone will work. Neither operator has a problem with this. Neither operator is wasting money on writing entire operating systems for third party phones. And neither operator, so far as I'm aware, is having a problem selling premium services to their customers.
Verizon's attitude has always been short-sighted and wrong. By promoting a closed platform, they've been limited to providing only the services they're prepared to think up, create, and promote. That subtracts value from their network for end users, creates frustration, dramatically raises support costs, and does little to bring in revenue that wouldn't be brought in anyway. They've been a poster child for what's wrong in the Telecom industry. I'm glad that's changing.
UMTS has caught on with most GSM operators - their major issue isn't any "forklift" upgrade (I think you're saying a switch to an entirely unrelated technology, but that's not the case, the upper levels of GSMv2 and UMTS are very similar) but the spectrum issues it has coupled with regulatory challenges. W-CDMA and TD-CDMA, the two major UMTS air interfaces, require 5 MHz of spectrum in either direction to work properly which has been a problem for US operators as many only have 5MHz of spectrum in various markets. Of the two major US operators, AT&T is in the process of rolling it out anyway as AT&T has huge amounts of spectrum in most markets; and T-Mobile is waiting on the FCC to hand over the AWS (2100/1700MHz) spectrum it won last year. Outside of the US, most operators aren't allowed to run UMTS on anything but 3G spectrum. Most have bid on 3G spectrum and won some, and have rolled out UMTS networks.
CDMA2000 to LTE will be a major change, but no more a major change than AMPS/D-AMPS to GSM, something AT&T Wireless and Cingular did at the beginning of the decade - in fact, it's an extremely similar switch over, from 1G versions of the TIA standards to 2G GSM for Cingular; from 2-3G versions of the TIA standards to 4G GSM for Verizon. It'll probably work better for Verizon than it did Cingular because OFDMA and CDMA have similar characteristics when it comes to spectrum usage and cell size/location requirements, something that wasn't true of D-AMPS vs GSM.
I hate to say it, but my T-Mobile service "just works" too. And the people around here with Verizon service don't like it.
Verizon "just works" where they're strong. T-Mobile too. Both also have patches of the country where they suck.
Sprint has the same control freakery Verizon does, and has a much poorer reputation nationwide. AT&T is almost as open as T-Mobile and they too have problems. You can't easily tie openness to reliability or unreliability, it just doesn't work that way.
When my GNU/Linux box doesn't work, I don't call Earthlink. I only call them if there's a problem with their service. That's pretty much how it should be.
If my GNU/Linux LTE phone doesn't work, I doubt I'll call Verizon (or Google, or T-Mobile, or whoever I use.)
They'll probably be using both systems in parallel. LTE is relatively flexible in spectrum usage, and Verizon is bidding on the upcoming 700MHz auctions any way.
It's unlikely they'll be getting rid of the CDMA2000 network completely any time soon, though if they have any sense, once they've started a serious roll out of the LTE stuff, they should drop sales of CDMA2000 devices to avoid getting in the same situation as, say, AT&T and Cingular who were both selling D-AMPS phones until a year or so before they dropped their D-AMPS networks.
It's VoIP, but that doesn't mean the carrier can't charge for them separately. MultiMedia Messaging (MMS) is also done over IP using current platforms, and people aren't generally charged data charges for using it (the operator usually pricing MMS messages at a fixed rate.)
That said, it would surprise me if operators don't generally move to a flatter business model. That's what's going on in the US already (most of the "minutes packages" are considerably higher than anyone generally needs taking into account unlimited off-peak and M2M) and I'm beginning to see evidence of the same in Europe. If the operators can get $100 per household, or $50 per phone, and they don't have to care about interconnect charges or any other stuff that would make the bill less predictable, I suspect they'd prefer to go down that route.
It's hard to tell what the long term future of IS-95/CDMA2000 (TIA standards) is. The 4G road map is a technology called Ultra Mobile Broadband, this is the TIA world's equivalent of LTE, but nobody has, thus far, expressed any interest in it.
Sprint is dabbling in WiMAX, though its deprecated its projects in that area of late. It did, at one point, experiment with a version of UMTS (GSM) called UMTS-TDD but ultimately rejected it in favor of WiMAX, so they're open-minded enough to consider things that fall outside of the narrow TIA systems.
Alltel, I believe, hasn't made any decisions or said anything about 4G. Between them, Alltel, Verizon, and Sprint are the three major CDMA2000 operators. As long as one of those operators remains tied to CDMA2000, it's unlikely the system will die completely.
Frequencies is an issue of local legislation and doesn't have much to do with standards. It's going to get worse in Europe too, as phones currently support GSM on 1800 and 900, and UMTS on 2100/1900, and are now going to have to support GSM on 450MHz and UMTS on 900 and 1800. As time goes by, the number of frequencies every handset supports is just going to go through the roof, even if the phone is only supposed to work in one region.
I think this is going to end up being a fight between WiMAX and LTE, with UMB getting relatively little support. While WiMAX is better known to geeks, it's no more open nor more efficient than LTE. LTE is arguably slightly better in supporting SIM cards, so ultimately if I had a choice, I'd prefer the latter to "win". But both are likely to have wide support across the world, it's unlikely that the same ideological differences that caused the CDMA vs GSM thing to be a mess will happen this time.
LTE is especially good news. It's an open standard, it similar underlying technologies to WiMAX and like WiMAX is all-IP - you can run any protocol over it you can run over the Internet, because your LTE device is an Internet connected terminal. Unlike WiMAX various protocols are standardized on top of it, so an LTE "phone" is still charge up, and plug in the SIM card, and go in much the same way as a GSM phone is today.
It's going to be hard for me to shake my impression of Verizon as a bunch of psychotic control freaks: maybe the Vodafone influence is finally having an affect. It'll be nice to have a third national operator with a genuinely open network that's worth considering. Being stuck with two GSM operators, one stuck with poor spectrum, the other barely giving a rats-ass about quality of service, sucks.
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Yes, did you read the comments?
{{cn}}
Sure, there may well be. But when people are banned the reasons are available for all to see. They were in this case. Why did El Reg not publish the fact that the supposed "victim" in this case was actually banned for sock-puppetry?
That doesn't appear to be the case. User:WordBomb shows a reason and links to criteria that appears to me to be reasonable. El Reg managed to avoid pointing out that WordBomb had been banned for sock-puppetry.
No, I didn't, that's clearly a lie as by the time you wrote the above I'd already responded to your comment. I originally said Wales appears to be acting in good faith after quoting lines from the hit-job El Reg has written on him that actually prove the case. The story suggests that a secretive Wikipedia cabal censored WordBomb. There's nothing apparently secret about it, the alleged "cabal"'s de-facto leader is clearly acting in good faith, so the story is dubious.
The reasons for the IP block ban are explained but not the user bans. The user bans are, ultimately, more interesting as they target specific actions by named individuals.
Actually, no I didn't. I said that Jimbo Wales appears to be acting on good faith, based upon what was written. Given he oversees Wikipedia, it's hard for me not to take that into account, especially given the lack of factual information in the El Reg article.
El Reg has given "undue weight" to someone who has a problem with stock shorting and is finding it hard to convince Wikipedia to incorporate their opinions on stock shorting and Overstock.com into related articles. Either Wikipedia's admins are acting in bad faith or they're not. What Wales is doing is certainly relevant to that discussion. Wales is apparently acting in good faith. That suggests to me that the Wikipedia admins he's watching over are doing so too.
It's notable{{cn}} (heh) that, reading between the lines, Jimbo Wales is actually pretty convinced that those editing the articles concerned in the way described and banned for the fact are acting in bad faith.
and
Not exactly evidence of a cabal acting in secret. More evidence of a group of people behaving trollishly and being banned for doing so.
Indeed, looking at the original sequence of events that supposedly set this off:
it looks like the whole thing was set off because of link-spamming from the supposed "victims" in this case.
The Register doesn't give us enough information to actually tell if this is the case or if there's some other reason. It doesn't report in full what was said by anyone proposing bans on the so-called victims. It portrays the events as arbitrary despite the fact that, actually, these things don't go on in secret. Most telling of all, if Wikipedia's admins were banning people without presenting reasons for doing so, this would be newsworthy which means the fact they're not saying no reasons were given is itself telling.
Very poor from El Reg. There may be a story right there, but anyone familiar with Wikipedia who's capable of reading between the lines is going to give a big "WTF" and assume El Reg is making up controversy where none exists.
If it were anyone but Ron Paul then I'd say yes. But Ron Paul isn't someone anyone in the political establishment really believes has any chance of winning. So why risk the chance of being caught setting such a smear campaign up to discredit a candidate who poses no real threat to begin with?
The likely culprits are people with no connection to either Ron Paul's campaign or any of his opponents. Either an over-enthusiastic supporter, or else someone with a chip on his shoulder about Ron Paul who wants to make him look bad. And I'm only considering the latter possibility because the "Well, Ron Paul voted against this, unlike everyone else, so he must be a great President!" phenomenon certainly annoys the crap out of me, and I'd imagine it does the same for others.
Have you tried a peaceful alternative? Since getting the Rabbids 2 game, my wife and I, whenever we're really, really, angry, just go to the Wii, shake the controller as hard and quickly as possible, and destroy Paris with the resultant burps.
Wait, no, that's destructive too. Does burping count as violence if it's destructive? Or, say, if you've eaten Thai food?
You know, I think I might just start an ISP if the MPAA is throwing a few hundred million to all who ask. Do I need to have any customers to qualify?
Coming soon: SquiggleNET. 768Kbps down/64Kbps up for just $99 a week. Guaranteed no more than 1,000,000:1 contention. Five nines reliability (0.0099999% has five nines in it right?)
You know, it's been a week or so, and we still don't really know the reasons for the firing. All of the rumors about a bad review are just that - rumors. Gamespot is, of course, denying that the firing had anything to do with the review in question, or complaints from the advertiser.
It's not civil disobedience unless you make every effort to ensure you will be prosecuted for breaking the law. If you break the law with no expectation of being caught or prosecuted then you're just breaking the law. You can't make a political protest in secret, it's a contradiction in terms.
Steve Jobs will get some of the money. The question is whether Apple will. Jobs has fingers in both pies, being a major shareholder in Disney and being CEO of Apple.
LTE is an evolution of the GSM family. UMTS was a refactoring with GSM's protocols being layered to run over a CDMA air interface. UMTS is now being refactored further so the high level protocols (voice and messaging services) can run over the Internet (IMS), and the CDMA (W-CDMA) stuff is being ripped out (as it should be) and replaced by a WiMAX-like interface. The two groups of layers still use GSM SIM cards etc so an integrated "phone" device can still be made, and they still use a GSM model of the subscriber-terminal-network relationship.
Saying they're radically different is technically true on one level, but that doesn't mean LTE isn't part of the same family. The 80386 and the Intel Core Duo are radically different too, but you'd still describe the latter as an "ix86 family" CPU.
The best part is the stupid CDMA crap is finally being ditched. CDMA was a nice experiment, but it should never have made its way into production cellular technology. The fact the 3GPP went for it showed the power of marketing can destroy the ability of any group of people to make rational decisions.
Given that the blown up sentence was, actually, the entire body of the comment, yes, you should have looked at it. The link was an extra, not even clickable, and barely related to the OP's point.
The OP was just wrong. Giving a URL of an interesting but barely on-topic article doesn't change that, and I'm surprised you feel the need to insult people who disagree with the notion that a comment that's 100% wrong is worthy of modding up.
It invalidates the parent's (your) post because the your post claimed that the OP was insightful.
The OP was claiming that Verizon "just blew up the US cell phone industry". Verizon has done no such thing. Verizon has jumped onto a pre-existing bandwagon.
I did read the article the OP posted, it doesn't change the fact that the major claim made by the OP was false. The article linked to does not in any way support the OP's claim. If I claim that God is a 7' Chinese Woman living in the Seattle Space Needle and then link to the best article ever written about the Space Needle, are you going to claim I should be modded "insightful" too?
If you mean that "Pip pip pip" thing that happens when a GSM phone has to negotiate a connection to the network, no, because we're talking about 4G GSM, which uses an entirely different air interface technology to 2G GSM, which is the only version of GSM that has this particular issue.
It's not insightful because Verizon isn't doing anything that AT&T, T-Mobile, and the entire European Mobile phone industry, hasn't been doing for decades.
Verizon has been a hold-out trying to buck the trend, together with a small but loud bunch of Qualcomm influenced US operators. They're not building the bandwagon, they're trying to jump on board.
So you bought a device that's locked to a particular network and uses an only partially open protocol stack to an open network running an entirely different protocol. And it didn't work.
I assume you think TEH INTERNETS is closed too, because the AppleTalk network stack on your Mac 128k doesn't work on it either.
That's assuming that really is a huge revenue stream, fully justifying the amount they're spending on locking down every phone they sell - the programming, the tech support, the lost custom, etc.
It almost certainly doesn't. They can still sell ring-tones even without locking down every phone in existence, they'll just sell less of them. How much less? Probably not so much less that it suddenly justifies the costs of the locking down.
T-Mobile and AT&T both, today, run open networks. 100% open networks. You can buy a GSM phone from anyone, and as long as it supports the same frequencies these operators run on, the phone will work. Neither operator has a problem with this. Neither operator is wasting money on writing entire operating systems for third party phones. And neither operator, so far as I'm aware, is having a problem selling premium services to their customers.
Verizon's attitude has always been short-sighted and wrong. By promoting a closed platform, they've been limited to providing only the services they're prepared to think up, create, and promote. That subtracts value from their network for end users, creates frustration, dramatically raises support costs, and does little to bring in revenue that wouldn't be brought in anyway. They've been a poster child for what's wrong in the Telecom industry. I'm glad that's changing.
UMTS has caught on with most GSM operators - their major issue isn't any "forklift" upgrade (I think you're saying a switch to an entirely unrelated technology, but that's not the case, the upper levels of GSMv2 and UMTS are very similar) but the spectrum issues it has coupled with regulatory challenges. W-CDMA and TD-CDMA, the two major UMTS air interfaces, require 5 MHz of spectrum in either direction to work properly which has been a problem for US operators as many only have 5MHz of spectrum in various markets. Of the two major US operators, AT&T is in the process of rolling it out anyway as AT&T has huge amounts of spectrum in most markets; and T-Mobile is waiting on the FCC to hand over the AWS (2100/1700MHz) spectrum it won last year. Outside of the US, most operators aren't allowed to run UMTS on anything but 3G spectrum. Most have bid on 3G spectrum and won some, and have rolled out UMTS networks.
CDMA2000 to LTE will be a major change, but no more a major change than AMPS/D-AMPS to GSM, something AT&T Wireless and Cingular did at the beginning of the decade - in fact, it's an extremely similar switch over, from 1G versions of the TIA standards to 2G GSM for Cingular; from 2-3G versions of the TIA standards to 4G GSM for Verizon. It'll probably work better for Verizon than it did Cingular because OFDMA and CDMA have similar characteristics when it comes to spectrum usage and cell size/location requirements, something that wasn't true of D-AMPS vs GSM.
I hate to say it, but my T-Mobile service "just works" too. And the people around here with Verizon service don't like it.
Verizon "just works" where they're strong. T-Mobile too. Both also have patches of the country where they suck.
Sprint has the same control freakery Verizon does, and has a much poorer reputation nationwide. AT&T is almost as open as T-Mobile and they too have problems. You can't easily tie openness to reliability or unreliability, it just doesn't work that way.
When my GNU/Linux box doesn't work, I don't call Earthlink. I only call them if there's a problem with their service. That's pretty much how it should be.
If my GNU/Linux LTE phone doesn't work, I doubt I'll call Verizon (or Google, or T-Mobile, or whoever I use.)
They'll probably be using both systems in parallel. LTE is relatively flexible in spectrum usage, and Verizon is bidding on the upcoming 700MHz auctions any way.
It's unlikely they'll be getting rid of the CDMA2000 network completely any time soon, though if they have any sense, once they've started a serious roll out of the LTE stuff, they should drop sales of CDMA2000 devices to avoid getting in the same situation as, say, AT&T and Cingular who were both selling D-AMPS phones until a year or so before they dropped their D-AMPS networks.
It's VoIP, but that doesn't mean the carrier can't charge for them separately. MultiMedia Messaging (MMS) is also done over IP using current platforms, and people aren't generally charged data charges for using it (the operator usually pricing MMS messages at a fixed rate.)
That said, it would surprise me if operators don't generally move to a flatter business model. That's what's going on in the US already (most of the "minutes packages" are considerably higher than anyone generally needs taking into account unlimited off-peak and M2M) and I'm beginning to see evidence of the same in Europe. If the operators can get $100 per household, or $50 per phone, and they don't have to care about interconnect charges or any other stuff that would make the bill less predictable, I suspect they'd prefer to go down that route.
It's hard to tell what the long term future of IS-95/CDMA2000 (TIA standards) is. The 4G road map is a technology called Ultra Mobile Broadband, this is the TIA world's equivalent of LTE, but nobody has, thus far, expressed any interest in it.
Sprint is dabbling in WiMAX, though its deprecated its projects in that area of late. It did, at one point, experiment with a version of UMTS (GSM) called UMTS-TDD but ultimately rejected it in favor of WiMAX, so they're open-minded enough to consider things that fall outside of the narrow TIA systems.
Alltel, I believe, hasn't made any decisions or said anything about 4G. Between them, Alltel, Verizon, and Sprint are the three major CDMA2000 operators. As long as one of those operators remains tied to CDMA2000, it's unlikely the system will die completely.
Frequencies is an issue of local legislation and doesn't have much to do with standards. It's going to get worse in Europe too, as phones currently support GSM on 1800 and 900, and UMTS on 2100/1900, and are now going to have to support GSM on 450MHz and UMTS on 900 and 1800. As time goes by, the number of frequencies every handset supports is just going to go through the roof, even if the phone is only supposed to work in one region.
I think this is going to end up being a fight between WiMAX and LTE, with UMB getting relatively little support. While WiMAX is better known to geeks, it's no more open nor more efficient than LTE. LTE is arguably slightly better in supporting SIM cards, so ultimately if I had a choice, I'd prefer the latter to "win". But both are likely to have wide support across the world, it's unlikely that the same ideological differences that caused the CDMA vs GSM thing to be a mess will happen this time.
LTE is especially good news. It's an open standard, it similar underlying technologies to WiMAX and like WiMAX is all-IP - you can run any protocol over it you can run over the Internet, because your LTE device is an Internet connected terminal. Unlike WiMAX various protocols are standardized on top of it, so an LTE "phone" is still charge up, and plug in the SIM card, and go in much the same way as a GSM phone is today.
It's going to be hard for me to shake my impression of Verizon as a bunch of psychotic control freaks: maybe the Vodafone influence is finally having an affect. It'll be nice to have a third national operator with a genuinely open network that's worth considering. Being stuck with two GSM operators, one stuck with poor spectrum, the other barely giving a rats-ass about quality of service, sucks.