Personal Communications Service

In the United States, Sprint PCS was the first company to build and operate a PCS network, launching service in November 1995 under the Sprint Spectrum brand in the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area. Sprint originally built the network using GSM radio interface equipment. Sprint PCS later selected CDMA as the radio interface for its nationwide network, and built a parallel CDMA network in the Baltimore-Washington area, launching service in 1997. Sprint operated the two networks in parallel until finishing a migration of its area customers to the CDMA network. After completing the customer migration, Sprint PCS sold the GSM radio interface network equipment to Omnipoint Communications in January 2000. Omnipoint was later purchased by VoiceStream Wireless which subsequently became T-Mobile US. In August 2022, T-Mobile US announced dead-zone cell phone coverage across the US using "midband" (1900 MHz) PCS spectrum and Starlink Gen2 satellite cell coverage, to begin testing in 2023. Using this satellite and midband spectrum, T-Mobile plans to be able to connect by satellite to common mobile devices, unlike previous generations of satellite phones which used specialized Earth-bound radios to connect to geosynchronous satellites with characteristic long lag time in communications. ==Rest of the world==

ITU Regions 1 and 3 (Eurasia, Africa) does not have a PCS band. The comparable technology in the context of GSM is GSM-1800, also known as "Digital Cellular System" (DCS). GSM-1800 launched in Hong Kong in 1997. It can form dual band service with GSM at 900MHz. This frequency was inherited into UMTS, LTE, and 5G NR. Korea, which has never used GSM, runs CDMA on 1800 MHz. See CDMA frequency bands. ==See also==