Verizon made it official today: it will be getting the iPhone, ending years of A T&T exclusivity in the U.S.

With the Verizon iPhone a reality, there is one ques tion that millions of iPhone owners are now asking themselves: should I switch c arriers? After years of frustration with dropped calls and spotty 3G connectivity, we und erstand why so many iPhone users are eager to become Verizon customers. In our r eader poll, 29% of Mashable readers said they're switching to Verizon ASAP, whil e another 16% said they're switching after their current contract expires. A lot of people have been asking us about whether switching is a good idea. More specifically, they want to understand the differences between the AT&T iPhone, a UMTS/GSM device, and the Verizon iPhone, a CDMA gadget. What exactly is CDMA? Is it better or worse than UMTS? Why is it impossible to to talk and browse the web at the same time on a Verizon iPhone? To answer your questions, we wrote a short guide on the subject of CDMA, UMTS an d the differences between AT&T and Verizon's 3G networks: The Basics on CDMA, GSM and UMTS The primary difference between the AT&T iPhone and the Verizon iPhone is the tec hnology each uses for 3G connectivity. AT&T employs the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System in its network. UMTS is built upon concepts from the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) s tandard, the basis for EDGE (Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution). Because of this shared architecture, most UMTS devices support GSM and EDGE, including the AT&T iPhone. GSM and UMTS technology is widely used worldwide. UMTS phones can be easily move d from one UMTS network to another, making them ideal for international use. Verizon, on the other hand, uses code division multiples access (CDMA), a form o f spread-spectrum signaling that utilizes bandwidth more effectively than most o ther solutions; it's often considered more spectrally efficient. CDMA also utili zes soft handovers of phone calls, so instead of switching directly from one tow er to the next (hard handover), CDMA devices can receive a signal from multiple towers simultaneously. That makes the shift between towers less detectable, and it decreases the rate of dropped calls. On the other hand, UMTS devices aren't a s efficient at soft handovers.