ition of the issue being addressed. This is hard to achieve when the stakes are SO high that people begin to attack one another's views and opin- ions. It can be very hard to find unbiased, intelligent explanations, and there seem to be even fewer unbiased, intelligent projections of what is likely to happen. When a standards process becomes highly politicized, the results are often costly technical problems and even costlier delays in deployment. This is not to say that standards organizations should back away from politicized and controversial issues. Just the opposite. At their best, standards organizations can bring a rational process into defining a problem and developing solutions. There are some smaller, but significant, effects of standards on technology in partic- ular cases. Sometimes a small part of a standard becomes a significant driver in the marketplace. The short message service (SMS) is a case in point. It was a small part of the GSM system that allowed short text-paging-style user messages to travel over the cellular signal channel. It has become a major industry in its own right and is now spawning successors that can carry images and other attachments. Other times an ef- fective standards committee quickly and quietly resolves a technical problem or a po- litical conflict, allowing a technology to move forward more rapidly or more smoothly. With all this said, let us take a look at some of the standards that have shaped the cellular industry. 9.2 Generations of Cellular Standards The original North American Advanced Mobile Service (AMPS) systems were the pro- prietary AT&T and Motorola networks described in Chap. 6. From that point forward, however, cellular technology developed through industry standards, and there has been an effort to organize the standards into generations, where each generation has multi- ple standards, but the standards provide roughly equivalent services. It is important to note that the notion of generations postdates the actual imple- mentations of the systems and sta