Sprint To Shut Down Nextel iDEN Network Next Year 53
Stephenmg writes "Sprint will be shutting down their iDEN network from its merger with Nextel and will migrate users to Push to Talk over CDMA. It will then use the 800mhz frequency to build out its LTE network. From the article: 'Sprint has been decommissioning iDEN base stations as part of its methodical transition to Network Vision, a flexible infrastructure intended to accommodate both the carrier's 3G CDMA technology and its emerging 4G LTE system. About one-third of the iDEN radios are scheduled to be removed by the end of this year. The iDEN system only offers downstream speeds below 100K bps (bits per second), a trickle compared with the multiple megabits per second available from LTE and from WiMax, Sprint's current 4G technology, which is provided by Clearwire. One major benefit to Sprint from shutting down iDEN will be the ability to reuse its 800MHz frequencies for the Sprint LTE network, which a U.S. Federal Communications Commission ruling last week made possible. The LTE service is scheduled to launch in the middle of this year on another spectrum band and later expand to 800MHz.'"
Good riddance (Score:5, Funny)
I cannot tell you how many times I've had conversations that went like: "Whatever you do, do ... push the red button!" / "Confirming, you want me to push the red button?" / "I c... hear what ... SQUAWK red button!" / "OK, so are you saying not to push it?" / (dead air) / "Hello?"
I don't know if it was a technology problem with iDEN (how hard could it be to get a simple TDMA system right?) or if Nextel just woefully underdeployed cells, but a decade ago they definitely set the standard for how much a network could suck and still somehow attract business customers.
I'm pretty sure the other providers managed to add in comfort noise which you could hear cut out whenever a packet got dropped. Maybe that's where iDEN screwed up?