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."

Comments

Nextel Broadband Flash-OFDM

[TimeTraveler1884]

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.

GO GO ACRONYM PATROL!

[Anonymous Coward]

I had to look a bunch of stuff up just to figure out WTF is happening in this story. Here's what I found. Posted as AC to avoid getting karma for quoting Wikipedia

Nextel

NEXTEL Communications (NASDAQ: NXTL) is a telecommunications firm based in the United States which provides a national mobile communications system. Unlike other cellular operators, NEXTEL utilizes the specialized mobile radio band (SMR) and was one of the first operators in the United States to offer a national digital cellular coverage footprint.

Flarion

Flarion Technologies is a telecommunications company specializing in broadband access to the Internet and wireless technology. It was founded by Rajiv Laroia in 1996 and is based in Bedminster, New Jersey, USA.

UTMS

Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) is one of the third-generation (3G) mobile phone technologies. It uses W-CDMA as the underlying standard, is standardized by the 3GPP, and represents the European answer to the ITU IMT-2000 requirements for 3G Cellular radio systems.
UMTS is sometimes marketed as 3GSM, emphasizing the combination of the 3G nature of the technology and the GSM standard which it was designed to succeed.

W-CDMA

W-CDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access) is a type of 3G cellular network. W-CDMA is the technology behind UMTS (a.k.a. 3GSM) and is allied with the 2G GSM standard.
More technically, W-CDMA is a wideband spread-spectrum 3G mobile telecommunication air interface that utilizes code division multiple access (or CDMA the general multiplexing scheme, not to be confused with CDMA the standard).

TD-SCMA

TD-SCDMA (Time Division Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access) is a 3G mobile telecommunications standard, being pursued in the People's Republic of China by the Chinese Academy of Telecommunications Technology (CATT), Datang and Siemens AG, in an attempt to develop home-grown technology and not be "dependent on Western technology" [1]. It is based on spread spectrum CDMA technology. The launch of an operational system is projected by 2005.

What's TD-CDMA then?