rst generation (1G) of mobile systems had been a success and the industry was looking to use digital technologies for the second generation (2G) of mobile phones. A number of standards were developed and rolled out, but soon the main competition was between Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) and code division multiple access (CDMA). GSM was championed by a group of European manufacturers including Ericsson (where the author worked) and CDMA by mainly a group of US manufacturers led by Qualcomm Inc. While the TDMA-based GSM standards were well understood, CDMA was based on a relatively unknown technology. Regardless, the competition focused around which of these two technologies provided more 'capacity', that is which one was capable of supporting more simultaneous voice communications over the same bandwidth. Capacity calculation and comparison is not trivial. Different technologies treat noise and multiple-user interference differently and therefore the comparison estimates varied significantly. The CDMA camp at one stage claimed a 21 times performance improve- ment compared with the analogue systems of the first generation. This was great news for capacity constrained mobile operators in the developed countries. The GSM camp disagreed with these claims, and calculated the improvements of the CDMA system more in the range of 3-4 times, and similar to that of GSM. This capacity-focused disagreement continued for a number of years. Meanwhile both GSM and CDMA systems captured significant market share over the 1990s and mobile telephony became a great success because of the contributions of both camps. The marketing hype was put to test in practice, and it turned out that the two technol- logies had more or less the same capacity performance, as Shannon's theorem would have predicted [8, 9]. The success of both technologies owed as much to business and policy factors as technology advantages. Technologically, both GSM and CDMA had created a significant value proposition compared with the existing 1G anal