2.5G Land, more musings on CDMA
Sprint PCS offers upbanded IS-95 (A), that is, IS-95 (A) placed at a higher frequency than conventional cellular. Still, the same technology other carriers have used since the mid-1990s, although now tweaked a bit. They claim their "Vision" service gives data speeds averaging 50-70 kbps, with peak speeds of 144kbps. That 144 would be their network speed, not what you would normally experience. And all of this is one fifth the speed needed to be considered 3G. Let's call their Vision service 2.5G.
Sprint claims greater nationwide coverage than any other carrier. Even here in heavily populated California Sprint does not cover the Highway 50 corridor to Lake Tahoe, barely any of the Sierra Nevada foothills, and little of the Sacramento Delta. It seems you can call yourself a nationwide network if you just list cities around the country, leaving huge gaps between. And how do you fill in those gaps?
How about cell sites costing one half million to one million dollars every seven miles across the entire United States? Yes, that's impossible. There's not enough people making calls to justify building such infrastructure. Better coverage and 3G and all the wonderful wireless services predicted for the last several years will never happen where it does not make economic sense to the carrier. Your nationwide coverage maps will look as they do now: like a slice of Swiss cheese. More later.