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.'"

Comments

Middle of this year?

[QuantumRiff]

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..

Re:Middle of this year?

[amiga3D]

I heard about it. I used to be a Boost Mobile customer with a GSM phone that ran off of Nextel towers. I got a message they were going to be working on the towers and that I needed to get a CDMA phone. Sure enough a few weeks later my service dropped in the dirt. I didn't mind buying a new phone the old one was 3 years old and my wife wanted a smart phone. I purchased a new phone and walla! still no service. I drove all over the neighborhood and still not one damn bar. It worked great everywhere around town but not in my house where my wife makes 90 percent of her calls. She's now the proud owner of a new AT&T Samsung android type smartphone. They upgraded me right off their network. It was nice while it lasted.

Re:Middle of this year?

[Anonymous Coward]

In the article it says as early as June 2013, but I guess nobody read it.. :)

Re:Middle of this year?

[satsuke]

Small point of clarification here -- Nextel never used GSM, they have only ever used iden. iden had sim cards like GSM and the backend / MSC "felt" like GSM, but the air interface -- the shoveling of bits across the air between tower and handset, have always been IDEN.

It's also worth pointing out that nextel used what is called the SMR band .. ~800mhz. This frequency typically propagates further than the 1900mhz the rest of Sprint is operating on, so it is entirely possible for the new phone tower in the same location wouldn't reach you, while an iden at 800mhz would.

Re:Middle of this year?

[Stephenmg]

I have already seen a few iDEN towers go offline. They are sending a letter to iDEN customers June 1, 2012 telling them to move to CDMA phones (I have one and it works great, much better PTT). The iDEN network will cease to exist as early as June 30, 2013. As June 30, 2013 approaches, customers will get even more notifications. http://www.androidcentral.com/sprint-set-shut-down-its-iden-network-early-next-summer

Misty water-colored memories...

[jtownatpunk.net]

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.

Good riddance

[subreality]

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?

Re:Good riddance

[LoadWB]

Working for a home-builder using Motorola iDEN phones was a blast. Like OP, we played with the data in the field quite a bit, and ISTR it did require a DUN connection to work but it was rock-solid. Sprint screwed up our billing so badly after taking over Nextel that we wound up with two accounts -- one Nextel and one Sprint -- no longer with shared minutes or services even though we were promised that everything would remain under one account. The situation was so frustrating that the operations manager asked me to work on the issue. I wound up having several meetings with various carrier business sales teams, including the regional Sprint/Nextel reps who promised that within "a few more months" everything Sprint and Nextel would be fully combined, including plans and billing. I ended the Sprint/Nextel meeting within a few minutes and kicked them out of the office (diplomatically, of course) as I had told them we wanted to move to Exchange-compatible phones (ActiveSync) NOT BlackBerry (my exact words before the meeting were "If you come with just Blackberries, don't come at all") and they showed up with nothing but BlackBerry and another promise that we'd be able to get non-BlackBerry phones within "a few more months." (None of their promises ever amounted to anything for us.)

We couldn't wait "a few more months" so we moved people who didn't need PTT over to AT&T and just kept the Nextel service for builders in the field and their in-office managers who used the hell out of PTT. Within the year following that move we brought the builders over as well as our new building management system required Palms, while Sprint/Nextel continued to make promises of "a few more months."

The short, Sprint bungled the whole thing with Nextel so badly that we halved our account with them within four months (about 180 phones) then were completely moved off within 18 months. I have a similar story about Alltel and Verizon, but I'll save that for a "bad Verizon" story.

PTT over CDMA?

[thegarbz]

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?

Re:PTT over CDMA?

[Tacvek]

I suspect they will be doing PTT over something like SIP and RTP. This is known as Push to Talk over Cellular (iDEN is not classified as a cellular network for regulatory purposes in the US) and is abbreviated PoC. It was standardized by the Open Mobile Alliance for both 3GPP (GSM-family) and 3GPP2 (CDMA-family) networks.

Re:PTT over CDMA?

[Stephenmg]

Its some VoIP thing, it requires data. Maybe qChat or something new. The new CDMA PTT works fine, call setup is not noticeable and coverage is better then iDEN.

Walla

[dtmos]

The word you're looking for is "voilà." (From the French, "see there.")

Re:Non-fubar enterprise text messaging?

[hairyfeet]

Yes because filling our dumps with a few more tons of working hardware is wonderful...for the Chinese that make the phones and the telecos that get to sell more contracts. Not so good for the environment though.