Last month a Congressman from San Diego made news by insisting that when Iraq’s telecommunications gets rebuilt, they be made to use CDMA, a cellular technology created by one of his campaing contributors, Qualcomm, rather than the more widely prevalent standard, GSM. Looks like Qualcomm didn’t get what it paid for: the Pentagon has just given a contract to MCI to set up a GSM cellular network in Iraq. There’s still hope though. If two competing cellphone standards are good enough for the USA, they’d surely be good enough for Iraq.
