Sprint phasing out Nextel’s iDEN network, selects vendors for $5b network upgrade project

Looks like the Motorola i1 Android set ( not pictured above) will stand as the highest-end Nextel phone ever — Sprint just announced that it’s phasing out the iDEN network sometime in 2013 as it begins a new four to five billion dollar network enhancement project called “Network Vision.” We’ve expected this for a while — the Sprint / Nextel merger has been beset by subscriber losses and rumors of a breakup for years now — but this is the first time we’ve gotten a date. Sprint’s rolling out push-to-talk on its own network to support its 10.6 million Nextel customers, but we don’t have a schedule for that yet. Sprint’s also announcing vendors for Network Vision: Alcatel-Lucent, Samsung, and Ericsson will each handle a region and be tasked with expanding and fortifying Sprint’s existing 1900MHz 3G network while buying 800MHz, 1900MHz, and 2.5GHz spectrum for future use. Interestingly, Sprint’s definitely hedging its WiMAX bets a little — it can upgrade its new gear to LTE with swapping in a baseband card and issuing a software patch, which certainly gives the company some 4G flexibility should Clearwire not pull things together . We’ll see what happens — the underdog’s making some moves. Sprint phasing out Nextel’s iDEN network, selects vendors for $5b network upgrade project originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 06 Dec 2010 13:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink

Posted by on December 6, 2010. Filed under News, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry