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Sprint To Shut Down Nextel iDEN Network Next Year
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.'"
I have a friend who works for a comms contracting firm who has been walking the corn-fields of northeastern and central indiana the last month (and will be for the next few) doing microwave pathing surveys to support the high-bandwidth backhauls required for the sprint LTE build-out.
His normally pasty white backside is TAN now!
So Friday? two weeks? Or maybe the "middle of the second half?"
You would think, if it was coming out soon, you would hear more about it..
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Pain and woe to anyone who has relied on the nextel messaging system for any enterprise automated dispatch system and has not moved to either another provider or a better way to dispatch, such as an instant messaging server, by June of next year. The chance that Sprint will make their enterprise MMS/SMS to email gateway "not" fubar messages beyond any usefullness is pretty slim.
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.
I cannot tell you how many times I've had conversations that went like: "Whatever you do, do ... push the red button!" / "Confirming, you want me to push the red button?" / "I c... hear what ... SQUAWK red button!" / "OK, so are you saying not to push it?" / (dead air) / "Hello?"
I don't know if it was a technology problem with iDEN (how hard could it be to get a simple TDMA system right?) or if Nextel just woefully underdeployed cells, but a decade ago they definitely set the standard for how much a network could suck and still somehow attract business customers.
I'm pretty sure the other providers managed to add in comfort noise which you could hear cut out whenever a packet got dropped. Maybe that's where iDEN screwed up?
PLEASE tell me they're killing their PTT beep at the same time. Some joker turned that on as the courtesy tone on a local ham radio repeater and I about shot my radio.
This is the end of a story where the best cell phone company was for some god awful reason bought by the worst and then slowly dissected and mutilated until there was nothing left.
Is there nothing Sprint can't destroy?
I have nothing else to say.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
https://nextelnetwork.sprint.com/?ECID=vanity:nextelnetwork
I thought one of the problems of CDMA and GSM networks was that call setup time was prohibitively long to get effective 2-way PTT communications going, something which doesn't affect a continuous voice conversation on a mobile phone. Wasn't that the appeal of the TETRA standard? 0.5s call setup time, the benefits of digital communications on a 2-way and packet data support (albeit slow)?
Our city has an area wide TETRA network managed by Motorola, not some ISP. This announcements sounds very like butchering one customer to benefit another.
Can someone tell me why a customer of a PTT system would want an internet browser instead of a 2-way radio? I'm confused. Anyone here have any experience with PTT over CDMA?
The word you're looking for is "voilà." (From the French, "see there.")
I did a 6 month student internship with Motorola a few years back and saw how iDEN works under the hood and the protocol is a piece of crap. Sprint should have shut it down in favor of CDMA years ago.
Not everyone realize, but IDEN is a network by itself, very few carrier in US has their own network. The truth of the merger between Nextel and Sprint was very obvious, Sprint needed more customer and Nextel wasn't going anywhere with their push to talk for long. If you look closely at the merger, the only person(s) got the best deal out of the merger was then CEO of Nextel and push to talk radio manager of operation. Everyone else in Nextel got the short end of the stick.
I had many iDEN phones ten years ago in Argentina, I was always amazed by how fast the connection is made, as soon as you press the PTT button the beep comes in and you can already speak, it takes less than hald a second. It was also very fast for international connections. Part of the trick is that your voice is already streaming even before the other peer has been found (that's why you could also get an error tone over your own voice when already 3 seconds into your speecBEEEEEEEEP!).
In the other hand, other two providers tried to implement PTT over GSM, it was a total dissaster. The main problem being that you had to hold the PTT button for almost 4 seconds in the first connection. I guess that GSM was not designed for such low latency operation. The question is...
Is CDMA be fast enough to replace iDEN?
My other signature is a car
Nextel iDEN SIM cards use a different format for the storage of contacts, which is not compatible with the format described in GSM 11.11 (for regular 2G SIM cards), nor with the 3GPP spec for 3G USIM cards. If you read EF ADN (the abbreviated dialing numbers file), you will see just one entry, called "See iDEN phbk", while the actual phonebook is elsewhere and has a completely different structure.
If you want to migrate your iDEN phonebook to another SIM card, export them to a CSV file, or upload them to Google Contacts or Yahoo Contacts - you can rely on SIM Manager - it supports all card types and can exchange data between them.
My colleagues have reverse-engineered the format, and to the best of my knowledge - there is no other software that can read Nextel iDEN cards. I must point out that I find the iDEN phonebook format much more reasonable - it is a linear file (in smart card terminology, it is a file that is made from N records of a fixed length), each record contains all the data about a given contact.
In contrast, the phonebook of 3G USIM cards is scattered across multiple files (emails, secondary names, secondary numbers, etc), which have different lengths, thus they require additional files to correctly map records to a phonebook entry. This has a lot of side-effects, such as "sometimes not all phonebook entries can have an email" or "some mobile operators issue SIMs that don't have all the USIM phonebook files", or "depending on the phone's way of handling the phonebook, sometimes you may end up with orphaned entries that cannot be removed", etc.
I never used Nextel's services so I can't comment on their coverage or call quality, but I do know that the engineers who designed the phonebook format kept it simple. For a comparison - implementing support for 3G USIM phonebooks (with the specs available) took longer than implementing support for Nextel cards (with no documentation at all).
p.s. I hope no one will reply with a link to the spec, because we've tried our best to find it before deciding to do it the hard way (-:
The saddest poem