155n8th said:
where the only carrier that uses it,

Cingular didn't have a choice. 850 is the spectrum they have. There isn't any 1900 spectrum available for most of the country, and if it was, it would be prohibitively expensive. Cingular did pay (a lot) for some new 1900 spectrum from Nextwave, but that;s only for a few areas - they couldn't doi that for the whole country. So the choice was stick with TDMA or move to GSM 850...

right now in the washington/baltimore area cingular only has two triband phones the 6200 and t616 and accouding to brochures well have international roaming by nov 3rd,

...but those phones only do GSM 1800. It will be interesting to see how good coverage is overseas without GSM 900. This is a new thing, and I'm not sure frequent travelers will get the service they're used to with GSM 900/1800 world phones.

but if you put a 900/1800 unlocked phone on or system you going to have problems with voice mail, and things like that.

I'm not sure what you mean. A dual-band GSM 900/1800 phone won't work at all in the U.S.

they choose the easy way out i think, it limits you to certain phone if you want all of your features. we live in ebay times i want my freedom to get a hot phone no-one has.

The "easy way"? What is the other way? I would say Cingular chose the only way...

they need to merge with somebody.

Well, yes, I guess that would "solve" the problem and give them access to 1900 spectrum, but honestly you can't expect them to do that just because there are some nifty tri-band phones out there... Not when they have the power to influence manufacturers to make phones to their specs.

Cingular is a huge, huge carrier. A couple years ago, they told manufacturers "we need GSM 850 phones". Such things did not exist then, but here we are and now there are plenty of them. If Cingular said "we need quad-band phones", there would be plenty of them on the market within 12 months. That's what needs to happen.