In the NGs I've read his posts in, he consistantly seems to prefer CDMA
sound quality out of the various digital schemes, but unlike many of us,
myself included, he owns and uses both CDMA and GSM on a regular basis.

Well, the question was asked why Sprint ditched GSM in favor of CDMA in
Wash/Balt, and frankly, while John's answer might have been a little
volatile for you, the fact is that _Sprint_ thought CDMA was the
technology
of the future, and felt it was worth abandoning the "standard" for.
John's,
your or my opinion is frankly irrelevant- Sprint's is the one that
counts in
this instance.

AFAIK, in talking with some Spint friends of mine, the GSM network in DC
was
a just a test- the "real" Sprint equipment wasn't going to be ready in
time
for their DC test market rollout, and they set up the GSM network to run
a
trial of their systems (billing, customer service, etc.) to insure
they'd be
ready for their nationwide launch the next year.  The only reason they
left
it up as long as they did (it ran concurrent with their "real" CDMA
network
in DC for awhile) was to let the GSM system finish "paying for itself"-
they
took in a pretty good amount of revenue from international roamers
visiting
the DC on business.  They never planned on implementing GSM nationwide,
and
it was obviously more important to them that the same system be used
nationwide, even if that meant losing the original poster of this
thread, as
important as he undoubtably is, as a customer forever.

Part of T-Mobile came from the combination of Voicestream and
Omnipoint on the east coast.  They acquired the Sprint Spectrum
equipment and bandwidth in the Washington-Baltimore areas.
Omnipoint started about the same time as Sprint Spectrum and
overlapped with it near the Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland
borders.

There are some important points to be aware of, IMHO:

1. Sprint came in when there was nothing. T-Mobile came in when there was
  an already existing network. It's a lot cheaper and a lot easier to
 upgrade an existing network, or to change it from C-AMPS (CDMA) or
  D-AMPS (TDMA), to GSM. All the licenses have been bought, all the
 roaming agreements are signed, all the antennas have been placed, etc.

 Most their customers are fed up with their old handsets and would gladly
 upgrade to new smaller, longer battery life units, especially if they
 were for "free" (included in the contract).

2. If you look back to the early days of PCS, C-AMPS had a lot of promise.
  It had many of the features of GSM, without the anoying capability of
  a user switching handsets on their own :-)  It also had a claimed
  ability to get more users in conversation per channel than GSM or D-AMPS.

 In the end this turned out not to be so. When a CDMA channel is heavily
 utilized, the dropout rate approaches 100% (no signal gets through).
 The main advantage of CDMA is that it is not distance sensative, i.e.
 TDMA (D-AMPS and GSM) have a distance limit of about 35 miles due to
 timing issues, but with PCS (1900mHz) that's irrelevant.

3.  AT&T wireless was the world's first 850 mHz GSM customer. Until they
   went into the business, no one was going to take a chance on producing
   the equipment. Converting from 800 mHz D-AMPS to GSM-850, is an EVOLUTIONARY
   change. Everything is the same for a service provider except for the
   programing of the controler cards in the base station and the handsets.

  If they have let's say 10 base station transceivers at a particular cell,
  they can convert one overnight from D-AMPS to GSM. Probably the D-AMPS
  customers won't notice excpet for more "system busy" messages at peak
  times. As the demand shifts, they could activate more channels as GSM.

  There is no technical reason to not have a self switching base station.
  It could automaticly change from D-AMPS to GSM or back based upon demand.

4. The whole WAP, 3G, GPRS thing did not reap the enourmous profits that
  most people expected. Why people would pay voice rates for data was
  beyond me and obviously beyond most customers.

  The way to make money these days on cell phones is international roaming.
  People will pay $1.50 or more per minute to get their phone calls
  while on vacation, while the cost to the service provider, is closer
  to $.10. The key to doing this to have their phone work wherever they go,
  and that requires multiband GSM.

Geoff.