mediate uses. They were a genuine breakthrough for the cellular industry, just like the IBM PC with a spread- sheet and a word processor was for the world of computers. However, once people have a PC, they see that they do not necessarily need a better PC, at least not right away. The same is true with cellular phones. The biggest competition for 3G might be 2G be- cause people already have it and it works. In addition, the conflict that prevented the creation of a unified standard took time. The initial delays prevented deployment by 2000. The slow growth continued due to the bursting of the dot-com bubble, which slowed the demand for high-speed mobile data service and reduced available capital for major deployments in both information tech- nology (IT) and communications. This was followed by the slowing of the general econ- omy, which continues to limit the rate of growth of 3G system deployments. Once the decision to accept multiple standards was made, each company or organi- zation went on to develop standards and specifications for the technology it preferred. Instead of building a single worldwide group of experts developing a single technology, we now have five smaller groups competing against one another. It is impossible to know the net effect of the decision to have multiple standards on the rate of deploy- ment. On the one hand, the experts are divided into separate camps, reducing the size of each brain trust. On the other, the competition to succeed first is pushing each group to accelerate its efforts. CDG, the group that proposed and is promoting cdma2000, has developed a migra- tion path from cdmaOne to cdma2000 and gotten its phase 1 standard approved as IMT-2000-compliant by the ITU. Both Verizon and Sprint PCS were upgrading their networks to cdma2000 in the summer of 2000. Meanwhile, wideband CDMA (W-CDMA), the successor to GSM, is having difficulty implementing its standard. There are probably a number of reasons for this. One of them may be a subtle point related to the upgrade of technolog