On Tue, Apr 1, 2008 at 11:40 AM, Micheal Espinola Jr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > My wireless industry insiders say that Sprint is a bad carrier, and a > hurting company in general. Any opinions as a subscriber?
One thing a lot of people don't realize is that "Sprint" is actually two carriers: The original Sprint, which is using a CDMA-based network, and Nextel, which is using iDEN. The two have almost nothing to do with each other beyond billing. CDMA is also used by Verizon and some other carriers, and has good coverage in the US. It's being updated for higher speeds and so on. iDEN was built by Motorola as a wide-area two-way radio network. The "D" stood for "dispatch", as in radio dispatch. It's optimized for fast call setup. That's why Nextel's PTT (Push-To-Talk) features work so well. The phone and data services were extras. That's why everything else Nextel sucks so much. According to our Sprint/Nextel rep: Sprint corporate is trying to phase out the iDEN network. For people who wanted PTT, they would offer hybrid phones that used iDEN for PTT, and CDMA for everything else. In theory, Sprint had planned to have everyone migrated over to CDMA or hybrid phones by now. Apparently they've had some trouble with that. The first hybrid phones had all sorts of issues, like not being able to make a call if one traveled outside one's home calling area. But in the meantime, Sprint still hasn't been investing in new iDEN infrastructure. (Why upgrade something if you're going to be heavily scaling back usage in a year or two?) They keep selling Nextel phones, though. So in many areas, the iDEN infrastructure is overloaded. You can nominally have a great radio signal, but there won't be any free channels to handle your call. -- Ben ~ Upgrade to Next Generation Antispam/Antivirus with Ninja! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbelt-software.com/SunbeltMessagingNinja.cfm> ~
