lemme see about 5 years ago, ericsson ruled GSM but their quality has become so bad. I started out with Voicestream in 1998 when it was still Omnipoint. Bought a singleband Ericsson, broke after 5 months (battery connection was bad) bought a tri-band motorola phone and happy ever since....
used it in singapore this summer and was charged USD$0.10 per minute local calls. pretty darn cool