big upgrade to sell to their customers, the carriers, and the carriers were looking for ways to cash in on the Internet boom, which some observers still saw as being permanent. The obvious answer was a new generation of cellular telephone technol- ogy. So-called third-generation(3G) networks would have data bandwidth com- petitive with wireline networks and would use Internet Protocol. A 3G system would support speeds in the one-megabit range for fixed stations, considerably slower for mobiles. But while it was easy to get an agreement on the idea of 3G, the details proved more contentious. The International Telecommunica- tions Union created an umbrella program called International Mobile Telecommunications-2000 (IMT-2000). The GSM camp united behind the 3d Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). Qualcomm, the San Diego-based com- pany behind 2G CDMA technology, proposed an upward-compatible upgrade called cdma2000 and was backed by a consortium called "3GPP2." Both sides agreed that the new standard should be based on some form of code division multiple access (and thus owe Qualcomm some patent royalties). But the The Great Telecom Meltdown specific standards chosen by the GSM advocates, called wideband CDMA (W-CDMA) or universal mobile telephony system (UMTS), was seen as unac- ceptable by many Americans [5]. Attempts to reconcile the two resulted in a typical compromise: IMT-2000 treats both cdma2000 and W-CDMA as 3G standards. Well before the standards for 3G radio transmissions were written, equipment vendors had begun to speculate about the types of devices that 3G would support. Like the integrated voice and data workstation developers of the early 1980s that designed (though rarely found customers for) "futuristic" telephones-cum-computer terminals, 3G fantasists sketched a number of poten- tial devices, typically combining the personal data assistant (PDA) with a mobile telephone. This tended to meet with a reality problem: A good PDA is generally too large to be a good mobile telephone; a mobile telepho