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Sprint Nextel Corporation is one of the biggest
telecommunications companies in the whole world. With 53point7
million subscribers, Sprint Nextel becomes the third largest
wireless network company in the United States of America. The
company was created in 2005 by the purchasing of Nextel by the
Sprint Corporation. Nextel was founded by Morgan E.O’Brien in
1987 as Fleet Call and later the company changed its name to
Nextel Communications. Nextel impacted the wireless market in
several ways. It is the first company to successfully provides
unlimited calls-plans to a huge number of subscribers.
Nextel – Taking Care for the CustomersNextel was the
first company to implement a nation-wide push-to-talk system,
which was similar to the walkie-talkie device, called Direct
Connect. The company was the first to provide GPS system in the
US. Nextel was also an industry leader in the Customer
Life-cycle Management. The company invested in analytics
capability which gave them the opportunity to surpass their
competitors in treating customers in a different way, based on
relative value and loyalty. As a result of these efforts and an
intense focus on the customers across the organization, Nextel
Company was known for the best-in-class customer rates, and
customer lifetime values.
Nextel operates on Motorola’s iDEN protocol which uses a time
division multiple access(TDMA) based technology. Unlike other
mobile cellular operators, Nextel utilizes the specialized
mobile radio band(SMR) and is one of the first cell-phones
operators in the United States to offer nation-wide
digital-cellular radio coverage. The push-to-talk feature(PTT),
which Nextel has gained its popularity with, is expected to be
made interpolate between the Sprint and Nextel networks by
2008. Due to difference in technology, users of the
Sprint-Ready-Link service cannot make or receive push-to-talk
calls with the users of iDEN-based network(Nextel). The
integration of the two networks will be dependent on the
deployment of Sprint’s chosen successor to the first phase of
their high-speed wireless EV-DO network. The new platform is
thought to be based on Qualcomm’s Qchat product, which has been
under development as a joint effort between Sprint, Nextel and
Qualcomm since January 2002.
Sprint Nextel – AdvantagesThe Nextel Company also
offers a feature for some of the mobile cell-phones they
provide to the customers, which is called DirectTalk. It has
recently upgraded their network to support the WiDEN packet
data protocol. This has allowed a increase in data speeds of up
to 90 kbit/s. Currently, the Motorola i850, i870 and i880 are
the only phones to support WiDEN. The pre-paid mobile services
of Sprint Nextel are under the brand name Boost mobile. Boost
mobile and its mobile cell-phones use the iDEN mobile
technology. In the past, Nextel has been known for not offering
a very rich selection of mobile phones. This is especially true
when related to its selection of alternate mobile cell-phone
manufactures, as Motorola has seldom licensed its iDEN
technology to other handset vendors.
In the summer of 2006, Sprint Nextel Corporation rolled out two
“Hybrid” Motorola cell-phones that were a turning point for the
company. Motorola released the ic502 and the ic402 on November
2006. The new series phones use the Sprint PCS-based mobile
network for placing and receiving phone calls and surfing
wireless internet and use the Nextel iDEN network to connect to
the Motorola’s walkie-talkie technology known as Direct
Connect. By the year of 2010, Sprint Nextel Corporation plans
to change the Nextel brand into the Sprint PCS brand.
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