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.'"
Re:Middle of this year? (Score:5, Interesting)
I heard about it. I used to be a Boost Mobile customer with a GSM phone that ran off of Nextel towers. I got a message they were going to be working on the towers and that I needed to get a CDMA phone. Sure enough a few weeks later my service dropped in the dirt. I didn't mind buying a new phone the old one was 3 years old and my wife wanted a smart phone. I purchased a new phone and walla! still no service. I drove all over the neighborhood and still not one damn bar. It worked great everywhere around town but not in my house where my wife makes 90 percent of her calls. She's now the proud owner of a new AT&T Samsung android type smartphone. They upgraded me right off their network. It was nice while it lasted.
Misty water-colored memories... (Score:5, Interesting)
This takes me back. My first data-capable phone was a Motorola on Nextel's network. It was also my first "nationwide" phone where all of my services were included in my plan no matter where I was. If I got a signal, I was on my home network. No more roaming! And I had data service at a blazing 9600 bits per second thru the proprietary serial cable. I'm trying to remember if I needed my own dialup ISP to get the Jornada 690 online or if that was included in Nextel's data service. Can't remember. It was 12 years ago.
I'm a little surprised there are still iDEN phones in the wild.
Re:Good riddance (Score:4, Interesting)
Working for a home-builder using Motorola iDEN phones was a blast. Like OP, we played with the data in the field quite a bit, and ISTR it did require a DUN connection to work but it was rock-solid. Sprint screwed up our billing so badly after taking over Nextel that we wound up with two accounts -- one Nextel and one Sprint -- no longer with shared minutes or services even though we were promised that everything would remain under one account. The situation was so frustrating that the operations manager asked me to work on the issue. I wound up having several meetings with various carrier business sales teams, including the regional Sprint/Nextel reps who promised that within "a few more months" everything Sprint and Nextel would be fully combined, including plans and billing. I ended the Sprint/Nextel meeting within a few minutes and kicked them out of the office (diplomatically, of course) as I had told them we wanted to move to Exchange-compatible phones (ActiveSync) NOT BlackBerry (my exact words before the meeting were "If you come with just Blackberries, don't come at all") and they showed up with nothing but BlackBerry and another promise that we'd be able to get non-BlackBerry phones within "a few more months." (None of their promises ever amounted to anything for us.)
We couldn't wait "a few more months" so we moved people who didn't need PTT over to AT&T and just kept the Nextel service for builders in the field and their in-office managers who used the hell out of PTT. Within the year following that move we brought the builders over as well as our new building management system required Palms, while Sprint/Nextel continued to make promises of "a few more months."
The short, Sprint bungled the whole thing with Nextel so badly that we halved our account with them within four months (about 180 phones) then were completely moved off within 18 months. I have a similar story about Alltel and Verizon, but I'll save that for a "bad Verizon" story.
Re:PTT over CDMA? (Score:4, Interesting)
I suspect they will be doing PTT over something like SIP and RTP. This is known as Push to Talk over Cellular (iDEN is not classified as a cellular network for regulatory purposes in the US) and is abbreviated PoC. It was standardized by the Open Mobile Alliance for both 3GPP (GSM-family) and 3GPP2 (CDMA-family) networks.