Why do the major Cell phone manufacturers treat the US market as a bastard child?

[RBOCMAN]

The Scandinavian and Japanese makers treat the US market differantly. I mean if its GSM that we lack, they should realise that we have T-Mobile(2nd largest Wireless provider in the world), AT&T and even the SBC side of Cingular that are moving streamlessly towards GSM and eventually 3G. It cant be profit driven, cause we have the highest elasticity for luxury items i.e cool phones and we're no where near saturation as in Europe, Asia and Africa(gimme a break, i cant imagine the the Masai having precedant over a new yorker). Is our GSM 1900 technically hard to develop for? This of course is in referance to all the hella cool phones that are always 4 quarters late in coming to the US.

[MTS2000]

Originally posted by: RBOCMAN
The Scandinavian and Japanese makers treat the US market differantly. I mean if its GSM that we lack, they should realise that we have T-Mobile(2nd largest Wireless provider in the world), AT&T and even the SBC side of Cingular that are moving streamlessly towards GSM and eventually 3G. It cant be profit driven, cause we have the highest elasticity for luxury items i.e cool phones and we're no where near saturation as in Europe, Asia and Africa(gimme a break, i cant imagine the the Masai having precedant over a new yorker). Is our GSM 1900 technically hard to develop for? This of course is in referance to all the hella cool phones that are always 4 quarters late in coming to the US.

The main reason is there has been more raw demand in Europe for wireless networks and phones. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, most countries were left with DEPLORABLE wireline systems- waiting lists for home phones that still in some countries like the Baltics are measured in YEARS...then you get a phone that MAY work some of the time! More R&D was put into building wireless infrastructure- cheaper to put up antennas then string millions of miles of wires, CO's. etc. Europe has always been ahead of the USA. GSM was developed and deployed in the early 1990's when analog cellular was king in the USA and mobile phones were still "luxury items" to most Americans.

A friend of mine who lived in Stockholm for the last 8 years came over here to my home in Metro Atlanta. He had a multi-mode GSM phone and was astonished, almost offened, as he watched the signal strength meter fall to below full scale, he explained that in Sweden, there were hardly any placed where a signal was not less than solid in any populated area. Our transistion to modern wireless such as GSM, CDMA, etc is still in it's infancy compared to Europe. Henceforth, the big players in Europe concentrate most of their advanced handsets for the more advanced and mature systems over there.

That is changing though, more high end phones are starting to show up in the USA- but our reluctancy to change technologies and decide on a standard keeps companies like Nokia and Ericcson from shipping some of the really neat and advanced handsets found in Europe.