Why different standards?

I'm curious, why exactly did the US, when it was developing standards
for its mobile providers, decide to go with 850/1900 instead of the
worldwide standard of 900/1800? Reasonable thinking would lead one to
believe that a worldwide standard would be the best result, but as it
is, there are phones that work in one place, but not in the other, and
vice versa. The same thing apparently is happening with digital radio,
with the US, for whatever reason, choosing a different standard than
the rest of the world. By also not 'forcing the market' with any
standard, you get a mix of at least 3 standards (GSM, CDMA, iDen)
which are incompatible with each other and can be argued is one of the
reasons that America lags behind the rest of the world in mobile
technology, as well as in uses and coverage, and deployment of new
phones, most of which are sold off-the-street 6-8 months before they
hit the showrooms of service providers in the US, which basically
require you to sign a contract to own a mobile phone (It is possible to
buy an 'unbranded' mobile phone, but they are nothing close to the
availability of regular home phones), and also have been known to
remove certain features which could potentially give away something for
free that they would charge for (like connections to PCs which could
allow free internet access on the phone).

gadfsa@comcast.net wrote:
> I'm curious, why exactly did the US, when it was developing standards
> for its mobile providers, decide to go with 850/1900 instead of the
> worldwide standard of 900/1800?

I *believe* 1800 MHz was already in use by the US Military.

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politics....interests...
hey ,at least US is much better than Korea and Japan