Yes they did. All the big carriers had to build out their networks right across the continent of Europe comprising of lots of different countries each (back in early days) with their own regulatory frameworks.
How the US - just a single country (its size doesn't matter) - managed to end up with multiple competing standards continues to make my mind boggle, whilst Europe we managed to lock things down to a common set of standards right across the continent.
> How the US - just a single country (its size doesn't matter) - managed to end up with multiple competing standards continues to make my mind boggle.
I'm guessing it had to do with Qualcomm being a US company and having the advantage for obtaining contracts and influence from politicians and other bureaucrats at the time CDMA and GSM were being standardized and developed. CDMA originated with Qualcomm and GSM was mostly developed by companies outside of the US (I think starting in Finland).
The only early network that was across "lots of different countries" was the NMT system and that was in the Scandinavian countries, which have always been their own special sort of group of countries.
I don't recall a company in Berlin building out networks in Greece, but that's the equivalent of what McCaw Cellular was doing in the late 80s/early 90s
How the US - just a single country (its size doesn't matter) - managed to end up with multiple competing standards continues to make my mind boggle, whilst Europe we managed to lock things down to a common set of standards right across the continent.