Slashdot Mirror
Nextel Broadband: Take Two?
Atryn writes "Many of you may recall the Nextel broadband trial of Flarion's Flash-OFDM Technology in Raleigh, N.C. last year. They have since shut down that trial. Now, Nextel has announced a new broadband trial of UMTS TD-CDMA in Washington, D.C. for this fall. Other coverage here and company press releases from Nextel and IP Wireless."
Before any post are made. I hope this isnt repersentitive of their service.
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
Is this the same Nextel that Sprint bought?
...meanwhile, Allstream (AT&T) and Fido have had commercial 2.5MHz CDMA broadband in place in this city for over a year.
FIRST ARTICLE:
Nextel Commits to TD-CDMA Trial
By Susan Rush
June 29, 2005
NEWS@2 DIRECT
Nextel Communications is the latest carrier to test the waters of UMTS TD-CDMA technology. The carrier plans to launch a trial using IPWireless' equipment in Washington, D.C. and surrounding areas in during the third quarter.
Nextel will use the trial to test network performance, customer satisfaction and digital convergence capabilities, among other things. The trial, which will last a minimum of six months, will be conducted in Nextel's 2.5 GHz spectrum.
"The upcoming trial in the Washington, D.C. area is an example of our commitment to evaluate the best available broadband options..." says Nextel Chief Technology Officer Barry West.
Select customers in Washington, D.C.; Arlington, Alexandria and Reston Va.; and Bethesda, Md. will participate in the trial. Nextel says it has no plans to make a service based on the technology commercially available at this time.
IPWireless reports Nextel is one of roughly 30 trial or deployments of UMTS TDD around the world.
Earlier this month, T-Mobile Czech Republic said it plans to commercially launch a wireless broadband network using IPWireless' UMTS TDD technology. The network will be up and running in Prague by year's end. T-Mobile Czech Republic's goal is to expand its coverage nationwide by mid-2006, the company said at the time of the announcement.
In March, Orange announced a TD-CDMA trial with its enterprise customers in France using IPWireless' UMTS TDD equipment.
Separately, Nextel announced it has enhanced its network in several Georgia counties to enable the delivery of its cellular, Direct Connect digital walkie-talkie services, Group Connect and wireless data services including text messaging, mobile e-mail and Web access.
The upgrade will enable these services to be offered in Athens, Barrow, Carroll, Clayton, Cobb, Coweta, Douglas, Hall, Heard, Henry, Pickens and White counties.
Nextel first began offering service in Georgia 10 years ago.
SECOND ARTICLE:
Nextel Moves Forward With New Broadband Wireless Trial
Posted: 06/29
From: TechDirt
Nextel got a lot of attention last year when they announced their Raleigh-Durham broadband wireless trial, using FLASH-OFDM technology from Flarion. The offering was reasonably priced (no, seriously) and offered high speed, mobile broadband access all over the region. In fact, there were plenty of rumors that Nextel was all set to announce Flarion's technology would be the basis of their next generation network. Then, along came the Sprint merger, along with Sprint's own plans to offer EV-DO broadband wireless technology. Still, many people thought that the combined Sprint-Nextel (officially named: Sprint) might offer two levels of service: an EV-DO offering focused mainly on mobile phones, and another offering aimed at DSL replacement. The combined company would most likely have enough spectrum to handle both types of offerings, and given Nextel's trials with Flarion, it seemed like it might be the technology they would use. Then, without much warning, Nextel shut down the Flarion trials, despite saying it had been a tremendous success. Almost everyone who tried it said they loved the service, and the new assumption was that Nextel figured they would just go with EV-DO once the merger was complete. Still, Nextel is famous for being incredibly thorough in trials that they do, and while the Flarion trial got all the publicity, they were still testing out plenty of other technologies in the lab (including EV-DO, pre-WiMax equipment, and UMTS-TDD). With that background, some may still find it surprising that, just ahead of the merger deal, Nextel is announcing trials with IP Wireless for UMTS-TDD technology in Washington DC. Unlike the Raleigh-Durham trials, this won't be entirely open to the public -- just to certain select Nextel customers. However, it's a pretty big win for IP Wireless, who seems to be on a roll, lately.
"Nextel. Done."
Sorry, forgot this. It's the same on both sites, so yeah.
Press Release
Nextel to Launch Wireless Broadband Trial on 2.5 GHz in Washington, D.C. Area with IPWireless; Trial will offer a range of wireless interactive multimedia and wireless broadband services using IPWireless' UMTS TD-CDMA solution
RESTON, Va. & SAN BRUNO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 29, 2005--Nextel Communications Inc. (NASDAQ:NXTL) will deploy a wireless broadband trial based on UMTS TD-CDMA technology from IPWireless, the companies announced today. The field trial will begin during the third quarter in Washington, D.C.; Arlington, Va.; Alexandria, Va.; Reston, Va. and Bethesda, Md.
"The upcoming trial in the Washington, D.C. area is an example of our commitment to evaluate the best available broadband options in order to ultimately deliver cutting-edge services for our customers," said Barry West, chief technology officer at Nextel. "Nextel has conducted lab testing of the IPWireless technology, and this trial will allow us to test the performance and economics offered by the TD-CDMA technology in our 2.5 GHz spectrum."
The trial will allow Nextel to test a range of subscriber services, including broadband access for laptops, desktops or PDAs, backhaul for enterprise campus and a wide array of Wireless Interactive Multimedia Services such as video streaming, online gaming, document collaboration and video conferencing. The trial will allow Nextel to develop and test digital convergence concepts that target business users, consumers, public safety agencies, universities and multimedia content partners.
During the upcoming field trial, Nextel will evaluate network performance and customer satisfaction under real-world conditions. The trial is scheduled to run for a minimum of six months and is not expected to have a material impact on Nextel's financial results in 2005. The trial will be offered only to select Nextel customers and is not expected to be offered commercially to the general public at this time.
About Nextel
Nextel Communications, a FORTUNE 200 company based in Reston, Va., is a leading provider of fully integrated wireless communications services and has built the largest guaranteed all-digital wireless network in the country covering thousands of communities across the United States. Today 95 percent of FORTUNE 500(R) companies are Nextel customers. Nextel and Nextel Partners, Inc. currently serve 297 of the top 300 U.S. markets where approximately 263 million people live or work.
About IPWireless
IPWireless develops advanced standards-based mobile broadband technology. The company's UMTS TD-CDMA technology has emerged as a leading global standard for wireless broadband. TD-CDMA allows operators to offer a spectrum of completely mobile, portable, or stationary end-to-end packet-based services with unmatched economics and true broadband performance. TD-CDMA has the highest average sector capacity, the strongest cell edge performance, and the lowest cost per megabit of any standards-based mobile technology available today, and is deployed by leading operators around the world including announced initiatives with T-Mobile, Orange, Nextel, and PCCW. The IPWireless Partner Program and chipsets allow device manufacturers and infrastructure vendors to very quickly bring innovative new TD-CDMA solutions to market. For more information, visit the company's Web site at www.ipwireless.com.
I subscribed to this service when it was available in the Raleigh area. It was actually quite speedy, when in the right place. The service was very touchy to location, I could barely get any service in my aparment, because of all the trees near-by. However, in RTP, the service was excellent.
My worst experience in the whole trial was when they screwed up my billing.
With all the WiMAX buzz in the wireless internet industry, it's interesting that a company like Nextel is using UMTS TD-CDMA for mobile wireless.
Makes you wonder if it's because of the slow development of WiMAX, or if it's just not as good a technology as it's being touted as.
Mods: Do you disagree with me? Go ahead and mod me down. Meta-mods will sort it out. Good luck!
From what I read, TDCDMA is easilly affected by interference which can drastically reduce the data rate. If this is true then I would think it wouldn't be reliable enough for standard mobile phones travelling through bad coverage areas. Maybe a good candidate for fixed locations as a WIMAX competitor? Based on these observations, I take NEXTEL's statement "We have no plans for a commercial offering at this time" to mean they don't know what exactly it's good for yet:P
God dammit, why SO FAR? I just got everything unpacked!
In soviet russia, broadband tries YOU!
Repeal the DMCA!
They were "merged" with Sprint. Sprint is already going with EV-DO (like Verizon) for everything...Sprint is the "parent" company of the merger so I wouldn't be betting on anything from Nextel for a while...
Just add {In Space!} to anything.
Nextel Flarion UTMS W-CDMA TD-SCMA What's TD-CDMA then?
had the service here in Raleigh.. It was nice.. didn't like how the basic plans where already NAT'ed so had to spend a little more than i wanted.. but it was all good.. till it stoped working (they canned it..) i hate it when they do that.. your paying for something that is worth while and they jsut say.. sorry we don't offer it any more and no there is no alternitive..
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
... when they screwed up your billing, was it in THEIR FAVOR?
...
Enquiring minds
I hope they manage to do it better than their wireless service was with the IM 1100. That was an absolute piece of crap. I could get a connection, but don't expect to do anything on it. Latency was in the high 3 digit range (like 900ms pings), and even for a simple web page, you'd be waiting for 5 minutes.
:) it was just a regular serial device, as far as the comptuer was concerned. It had a short init string to turn it on, and then you'd fire up pppd.
The only practical thing I ever got it to do was send a webcam feed, while I was driving. One small picture every 5 minutes was ok for that.
The only upside was that it worked under Windows and Linux.
I'll be happy if this new service works, assuming they're rolling it out to the whole country. I heard Verizon had one that worked pretty good. I don't really want an extra cell phone bill though.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
What about Craig McCaw's other offering: http://www.clearwire.com/? I haven't seen much discussion on slashdot about this. I am currently connected through this service (as of last night). So far, so good ... but time will tell. Clearwire is currently offered in 9 metro-areas in the US, with 3 announced as 'coming soon', and is not a 'trial' platform.
Those schmucks at Nextel really steam my clams....
I got on the demo, and in point of fact, I'm posting here on Slashdot while using it. It'll be working thru the end of the day tomorrow.
Which it can be a little finicky at times, overall I rate it as a very good service. With my wife driving, I connected my laptop thru the Nexttel service while we were driving in our car near the intersection of I-40 and US-1. I stayed connected the whole time (compiling some stuff on a server at home) until we reached the far side of Durham, NC, on I-85.
I love the service and the pricing was quite reasonable ($50/month for unlimited time/MB). I was really pissed at them for yanking it. And its not like Sprint has anything else - their CDMA service is slower and more expensive.
I'll use this service right up to the time they turn it off, but as far as I' concerned, its yet another stupid move by some PHB.
Just tell me how this will affect how much porn I can download at once.
I find the Nextel service to be rude and annoying. We got away from walkie-talkies to go to phones, why go back? And if you live in the sticks it doesn't work anyway /Vote Quimby
Vote Quimby!
Hope NexTel have better luck with their IPWireless deployment than Woosh Wireless have had in New Zealand.
While UMTS TD-CDMA has great potential, it just hasn't worked right in NZ, with average end-user latency of 250ms - just over the air. Add another 200ms to get to a website in the US (or another 250ms to get to another Woosh user) and it's like using satellite.
Upstream bandwidth has been reported at a paltry 38-64kbps, while download has not fared much better, averaging 256kbps. I have used several Woosh branded IPWireless modems myself and my results have been similar.
I understand their was a deployment in South Africa that resulted in a class-action lawsuit of customers against their ISP due to performance issues. This was discussed on the ISP-Wireless list about nine months ago.
I wish IPWireless the best of luck, but so far the performance of their kit has not impressed me.
"Nextel" and "modern technology" pretty much don't belong in the same sentence together, unless it's a sentence like this one stating how little they have in common. The phone I got a little over a year ago has a monochrome screen, and no Java support. Go Nextel.
Sure, their radio coverage is superb, but their phones are like 1998 models, and their packet services are pretty much a joke. Not to mention inaccessibly overpriced.
I know this is not on the topic, but I believe /. is the place to ask.
I work with a team of developers who write a program for SIM card management, and we plan to add support for Nextel iDEN cards.
Does anyone know where the specifications of these cards can be found?
The saddest poem
Ther merge hasn't been approved by the FCC yet and there are signs that it may not happen at all if some Sprint partners have their way.
If all of the US carriers just went to 3GSM... we'd have better phones... faster... and the underlying infrastructure (things like mobile sites/towers) would be cheaper as well.
Granted, they'd have to be tuned to different frequencies here in the states... but the prices would come down a bit since the market would be much larger. Hell, Nortel and Nokia are probably making hardware that simply has modules that are swapped in depending on the intended geographic location...
It makes too much sense, I guess. : (