Re: T-Mobile Sprint Merger: Say goodbye to scam calls

On 8/7/2020 11:31 AM, JF Mezei wrote:
> On 2020-08-07 11:40, nospam wrote:
> 
>> it was a disaster for nextel. sprint killed it.
> 
> Actually the problem is that Sprint bought it and didn't shut it down
> fast. (in part because CDMA didn't offer the "push to talk"
> functionality of iDEN. )

The only virtue of Nextel was the PTT feature. Shutting it down 
immediately, without an adequate replacement, would have been bad.

The CDMA carriers tried to do PTT. The problem was that the latency was 
too long. See 
<https://www.rcrwireless.com/20030908/carriers/when-seconds-count>. 
Sprint had dreams of retaining all the Nextel customers even after they 
shut down iDEN service. That didn't happen. There was at least one 
combination CDMA/iDEN phone, the Motorola Buzz ic502, but it was just 
too late. Then Sprint screwed up again with WiMax.

With LTE you can now have PTT functionality separate from the carriers' 
offerings. Zello <https://zello.com/> has a good product for this. It's 
not inexpensive but it serves the needs of some businesses.

Where my wife works, they were using Nextel for a while. Someone thought 
that the PTT would be a great feature but the reality was that due to 
HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) it was more 
of an annoyance, leading to it being mocked as "PTA" (Push To Annoy) 
<https://www.tampabay.com/archive/2004/01/05/walkie-talkie-phones-efficient-but-annoying/>. 
You need a secure communication platform for health care applications.

The other problem with Nextel was that it was very much an urban product 
and if you needed coverage in rural areas you couldn't use it because 
there was no iDEN coverage. For a company where you're sending employees 
to the far reaches of the county it was not a good service, and 
employees had to have their own personal phones on AT&T or Verizon to 
supplement the Nextel service. This was an annoyance to employees 
because back then the carriers were not providing unlimited voice 
minutes, except for off-peak use, so they had to pay for those 
work-related calls themselves.