If you've been in Europe lately you know how much easier it is to transact business or go out for dinner thanks to the conversion of all (well, except the eternal holdout - Great Britain) currencies to the Euro.  They've also got the right idea when it comes to cellular technology, too, as all phones there work on the GSM standard.  Take your phone from one country to another and use it on all of the various systems with no difficulties.  Or buy a phone that's "unlocked" (i.e., not tied to, branded by or subsidized by a service provider) and use it wherever you like by simply putting a SIM card in it.  But that's Europe.  The rest of the world is a different story. 

The world is a mish-mash of wireless standards.  Some countries have second generation digital, referred to as "2G" while others have "3G" and several even have "2.5G."  There are also various technical standards... even in this country we have GSM, CDMA and a smattering of TDMA (although that's disappearing - AT&T is phasing it out quickly and won't sell any more phones that work on that technology).  Going forward, various countries, companies and governments have been talking about 4G and, in Japan, even 5G. 

What's a traveler to do?  If you really wanted to take one phone with you that would work all over the world you'd need one that would have about five different radio chips in it to make it work.  Certainly that's not going to happen.  It's much more sensible to have the entire world working on one standard and, while it's not likely that the entire world will agree on that there are some steps in that direction.   

There are various technical groups around the world that develop standards for everyone to follow and the latest in being referred to as "Long Term Evolution" or, naturally in our world of scrabble-box acronyms, "LTE."  Verizon Wireless - which made an announcement just last week that shocked the industry, stating that they would "open" their network to various devices and services - revealed that LTE is their future path, too.  This has significant long-term implications, not the least of which is that Verizon and their nearly-half-owner, Vodafone (UK), may ultimately have phones that work on each others currently incompatible systems.  Today if you want to take a VZW phone to the UK where they use GSM you're S.O.L. (do I get the prize for most acronyms in a sentence now?).  

Vodafone and Verizon intend to launch, in fact, a test of the LTE system in 2008.  Companies from all over world - Alcatel, Motorola, Nokia and others - will supply the equipment.  Presuming that things work out as most in the industry anticipate it's likely that they'll put this standard on the road map for their future development.  AT&T has been in the LTE camp for a while now, having announced several months back that they're putting it squarely on their future road map.  And the GSM Association, the predominant mobile standard association in the world, is behind it, too.

In short, it looks like we're moving in the direction of a unified, one size fits all standard.  It won't happen tomorrow, or even next year, but the fact that everyone is, for once, on the same page, makes it more likely that there will be a global mobile standard in the near future.  And then us poor traveling folks can put away the four different phones, chargers, sync software applications and accessories that we've been hauling around the U.S., Europe and Asia and settle on one, true, worldwide phone.  And when that happens, it could conceiveably be the final nail in the coffin for many landline phone providers, too.  After all, with one phone that works everywhere - and likely uses VOIP for long distance, making it dirt cheap or free to call internationally - why would you even need a landline?