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FCC Approves Sprint-Nextel Merger
Luke writes "Sprint and Nextel received approval from the Federal Communications Commission to merge to form the number three wireless company on Wednesday. FCC commissioners gave the companies unanimous support for the merger. The companies, which announced the merger on Dec. 14, 2004, expect to finalize the merger soon."
Verizon wants is in attempts to purchase MCI. Got it in a postcard from the state regulators yesterday...
Actually its going to be Sprint Consumer (Current Sprint PCS) and Sprint Buesiness ( Nextel now that Sprint bought them)
It's called letting our phone work for us. With the two-way feature, I can talk to someone with the phone sitting on my chest while I'm laying down trying to track network cable. In the car, I can beep someone, and if they are available they can talk- if not, they aren't interrupted by a continuous phone ring.
Some people misuse it, this is true. Explain to them that the little "speaker" button on the top of their phone turns off the speaker-phone aspect. This means they have to hold it like a regular phone, but when they are in public it doesn't irritate as many people.
Well, considering that Nextel has the best customer retention in the industry, makes the most money per hand-set, and the CEO of the new company will come from Nextel I have a feeling they see it differently than you.
In all actuality, I believe this merger puts a lot of the spectrum in the hands of the new company. This will allow them to expand their markets to compete with DSL (potentially). Also if they can get private call working between their two networks, the economic "network effect" will bring the customers onto Sprint as the older Nextel technology shows its age.
As a general rule, GSM is usable places outside North America, while CDMA and iDEN aren't. A year ago, wandering around asking if phones worked anywhere else would result in three affirmative answers (from ATT Wireless, Cingular and T-Mobile), and three blank stares (from Verizon, Nextel and Sprint).
After the ATT-Cingular merger and the Nextel-Sprint merger, we'll only have two of each kind of answer. This will make shopping so much faster!
Ultimately we'll just have two monopolies: PhonesThatWork, Inc. and PhonesThatSuck, Inc. And they'll both charge an arm and a leg. Joy.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
In the mid-eighties, America had, essentially, a couple of mobile phone networks (in most areas) based upon a single standard, AMPS. This was largely the result of the AT&T monopoly and its legacy (clearly, the Baby Bells weren't going to suddenly switch standards for their wireless networks, and there was little point for the "A" carriers to use an incompatable standard.)
The EU (or EC, or EEC, depending on what part of the story you're talking about, but as it's the same organization, I'll refer to it as the EC from here on) didn't have anything like that. Every country had one or two mobile phone networks, generally based upon custom standards. The UK, for example, used Motorola's ETACS. Functionally, the standards were similar, they just used different signaling methods, or had different operating parameters, that made them incompatable with one another.
This didn't bode well for the emerging European Union, as it meant people travelling from one state to another wouldn't be able to roam, and the cost effectiveness of running this many incompatable technologies was clearly a problem. So the EU passed a decree saying that the mobile phone carriers had to adopt a single standard that they would run on their 900MHz bands. The EU didn't say what the standard should be, or that they should turn off their custom networks (though it made sense for them to do so if the new standard was better), simply that the industry had to decide on a standard and get it working across all 900MHz networks. And if a country didn't actually have a 900MHz network, it was to get one started right away.
GSM started as a project by France Telecom's mobile phone subdivision and was created independently of the EU's directive. It was one of the standards considered by the various standards groups, and in the end was their choice.
Now, where it gets interesting is when you fast forward to the early nineties. Britain felt that just having two networks didn't create enough competition, so sold off the 1800MHz band for "DCS" services. This had nothing to do with the EU, and Britain said it didn't care what standards were used in that band. The two mobile phone operators at the time, Orange, and one2one (now T-Mobile), ended up both chosing GSM. This was after Qualcomm created CDMA (IS95) and started lobbying for its adoption, so you can bet both operators saw it and evaluated it. Several other countries followed suit, and also opened up the 1800MHz band, and the companies that bought licenses also decided on GSM. It wasn't until a significant number of countries had done so that the EU decided that, because the 1800MHz players currently had a disadvantage over their 900MHz competitors, 1800MHz was to be opened up across the EU, and that GSM was mandated for the remaining operators.
This wasn't a big conspiracy against CDMA. It was done because the existing operators had chosen that standard, and there'd have been no point in the EU opening 1800MHz if non-GSM operators could gain control of the bands in other countries. Had Orange and one2one choosen CDMA, or one choosen CDMA and the other GSM, and this pattern been followed by succeeding operators, then you can bet the EU would have mandated CDMA everywhere, or at least one CDMA network and at least one GSM network everywhere.
The person you're responding to claims that some operators are now running CDMA on 450MHz. I haven't heard of that. But I'd expect the same behaviour from the EU as thus far, eg if it picks up steam, to prevent 900/1800/3G GSM/UMTS operators from having an advantage over an emerging network of 450MHz CDMA operators, the EU to open that band across the Union for CDMA operation (unless, of course, there are large numbers of operators using a competing standard on the same frequency)
My belief is that much of the propoganda against GSM from CDMA proponents is based primarily on making use of a lack of
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.