e system. This increases reliability while lowering the cost of manufacturing and helps products and services reach the market- place at reasonable cost. This technical face of standards is clear. The other face of standards, the more polit- ical one, is considerably murkier. Now that five different 3G standards have been ap- proved, there is an ongoing battle among them that often obscures issues rather than resolving them. Standards are a good tool for solving problems but not a good tool for comparing sys- tems. And they are an even worse tool for predicting the future because the predictions will be based on the fallacy that the best technology wins. 3 How long it will take move the existing 2G networks to 3G and to deploy 3G cellular and wireless local loop (WLL) worldwide is much more dependent on economics and politics than it is on the differences between CDMA and TDMA or the even smaller differences between W-CDMA and cdma2000. 4 Now that we have defined the general background of standards and the history of cellular standards, let us turn our attention to the standards that define the topic of this book: CDMA systems. In Part 4, "Key Data Concepts," we will address information technology (IT) standards and the challenge of convergence. Convergence, or bringing together telephony, IT, and video standards, is a challenge because these three tech- nologies have developed separately for decades. Each industry's standards were devel- oped to meet different needs, provide different services, and solve different technologi- cal problems. As we shall see, convergence is definitely a work in progress. 2We did say at the beginning of this chapter that the lack of standards makes it easier to have fun. Drilling holes in 20 computers was certainly an unusual experience. 3f the best technology always won, we would be listening to music on reel-to-reel tape recorders and watching movies on Betamax tapes. 4As Ecclesiastes put it, "under the sun, the race is not to the swift nor riches to the intelli- nor favor to men 