Well, it's the morning of June 30, 2013 and there is now no iDEN signal where I am in northwestern part of Los Angeles County, CA.

My hat is off to all of the people of Nextel & Motorola who built & operated the phenomenal iDEN network and it's stellar PTT & voice systems. Thank you for everything you did.

I stumbled across this link on a HowardForums forum, seemed like good info for anyone interested in getting more life out of their Nextel phones after iDEN is killed next month.

The initial posing on page one of this thread gives some detailed ease-of-use info relative to Direct Talk.

http://www.howardforums.com/showthread.php/838371-Ne ... »

I would like to know why and how U. S. Cellular representatives have talked customers such as myself into upgrading and purchasing new phones from them, knowing full well that these devices were going to be useless in a few short months? I've purchased 2 new phones from us cellular in the last 5 months... I had heard rumors of the future sprint buyout and spoke with the us cellular agent about it... She confirmed the rumors with me.... Yet still sold me 2 new galaxy's... Never mentioning the the devices weren't going to be compatible with Sprint... and I basically handed us cellular a good amount of money for nothing! Maybe that was my own fault for not researching the facts more before the purchase... However I do think any merchandise sale...
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http://www.phonenews.com/att-launches-enhanced-ptt-s ... »

When you look at the ever-more-rugged devices ATT is introducing, including the Sonim line, and the way ATT is positioning their PTT plans, and the fact that they are doing their new PTT over LTE, it makes one wonder if ATT might not be the next Nextel...

AT&T | Done? 😳 😉

Good news for Sprint's CDMA- based "Sprint Direct Connect" PTT service:

http://www.insidermonkey.com/blog/sprint-nextel-s-ge ... »

a brief excerpt:
"...Most noteworthy is the retention of the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA), which had been on the Nextel network for its push-to-talk feature. The government agency announced a deal to transition over to the Sprint network as Sprint Nextel winds down its Nextel network by the middle of next year. Sprint Nextel Corporation (NYSE:S) has offered 2,000 Direct Connect (Sprint’s push-to-talk service) Kyocera devices for FEMA’s evacuation programs in disaster areas. The service is expected to be in full operation for the current...
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Was browsing Sprint's website, and they took down all of their iDEN phones. Nextel is officially done. End of an era of exceptional PTT.

I know others have asked this question. This separate Sprint forum is now even more pointless than ever before!

Mods, what's the deal? 😕

It's been a couple of months since anyone posted anything regarding the new Sprint Direct Connect ("SDC").

Does anyone out there use it, or even know of anyone using it?

Anyone see any advertising for it yet?

Any iDEN users out there who have been contacted by Sprint yet, like maybe Sprint trying to get you to switch from Nextel to SDC?

is there software or something to kept your company from tracking you? we are switching to nextel next week worried about big brother watching.

Interesting bit on the PhoneNews.com website, worth reading the whole article:
http://www.phonenews.com/sprint-to-begin-phasing-out ... »

short excerpt:
"Sprint has taken great strides to de-emphasize iDEN since the last major upgrades to the network in 2008 which allowed it to offer unlimited flat-rate service and proved unexpectedly popular, so much so that it was able to increase ARPU on the network and draw in more customers than expected."

Which seems to say that Nextel/iDEN was not dying of natural causes, rather it was murdered by Sprint ;-)

Interesting that this outfit in Singapore uses iDEN, seems to have thorough coverage of the entire island.

homepage: http://www.grid.net.sg/index.html

iDEN+GSM phone (dual-SIM, both iDEN & GSM active simultaneously): http://www.grid.net.sg/index_GRIDi976.html

Nextel’s plan to deploy 3G voice and push-to-talk services in Mexico, which was expected by the first half of 2012, may be in trouble after a Mexican court ordered the Ministry of Communications and Transportation to revoke the mobile concession awarded in October 2010... (full article at link pasted below)

http://www.rcrwireless.com/americas/20111118/carrier ... »

I can't believe this is true, but I'm sure the readers of this forum will correct me if I'm wrong.

For our Verizon account, our Unlimited Minutes begin at 9 PM, and if I place a 30-minute call beginning at 8:55 PM, Verizon charges the first five minutes of that call against our Anytime Minutes (or "Peak Minutes" as Verizon calls them), while the balance of 25 minutes that occur after 9 PM are charged against our Unlimited Minutes.

With Sprint-Nextel's "Business Essentials" plan, our Unlimited Minutes begin at 7 PM, but if I begin a 30-minute call at 6:55 PM, Sprint charges ALL 30 MINUTES AGAINST OUR ANYTIME MINUTES, because the call was STARTED before 7 PM.

The same is true on two of our Nextel lines where we pay $10/mo/line to have...
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I was scratching my head several months ago when SouthernLINC announced that they had signed a nationwide iDEN roaming agreement with Sprint so that SouthernLINC's regional customers could roam on Nextel iDEN nationwide. Why bother I thought, when Sprint had already announced the sunsetting of iDEN in 2013?

I stumbled across this article, wherein the CEO of SouthernLINC explains his strategy:
http://www.fiercewireless.com/ctialive/story/souther ... »

I actually called SouthernLINC customer service and asked what is going to happen to their nationwide roaming when Sprint shuts down iDEN in 2013, but the SouthernLINC CS agent couldn't answer that question. I suppose that the intero...
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Other than the fact that the new Sprint DC phones utilize the 800 ESMR band, what essentially is different between this QChat and the one of 2008?

Looking at the map, the coverage from 2008 compared to now is the same, the way the system works is the same (VOIP), the features are the same, etc. The only two things that have changed are the branding (Sprint DC rather than Nextel DC) and the 800 band. Is this bandwidth even available anywhere for these phones? Basically, it looks like the phone has a radio in it that it cannot currently utilize anywhere. If that isthe case, the phone will be obsolete before it has a connection to the lower frequency.

The new DuraMax DCS phone has a feature called 'Land Mobile Radio' (LMR).

What is this?

In the past few months Sprint switched all Nextel iDEN customers over from the original Nextel voicemail system to Sprint's own voicemail system.

Have any of you Nextel iDEN customers experienced any issues with the Sprint-based voicemail?

About every two weeks or so I get anywhere from one to a few voicemail messages that are totally garbled and nearly pure static. This has happened with several different callers, no matter if the callers were on landlines or their cell phones when leaving messages, so the problem has to be with Sprint's voicemail recording system, not the caller's phones.

Also, when I call in via a landline to listen to new voicemail messages, the garbled/staticky messages are identical to when I listen to them fr...
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Well, I'd say that Sprint's Q2 results speak for themselves, and they pretty much support what I said in my earlier posts in this thread:

https://www.phonescoop.com/articles/discuss.php?fm=m ... »

If Sprint's customer service is so good, and their future so bright, why is it that 327,000 iDEN customers left just last quarter, despite the fact that Sprint announced they would have the "next generation" of push-to-talk over CDMA, with high-speed data in addition to great new PTT features, starting the end of this year (2011)? "A new generation of PTT that will not only be as good as Nextel iDEN, but better." And yet, KNOWING that this supposedly great new PTT system of Sprint's is just around the corner a few short months ...
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Why do we continue to have two Sprint forums? I can see splitting Boost and Virgin Mobile up, but not Sprint post paid. At least call this forum just "Nextel" if you are going to continue doing this. It is confusing and redundant.

Does anybody know when NFC technology will come to an iden phone. The i886 is a great field phone, it would be perfect if it had NFC technology. The only info I was able to find was from a company named iwow that has an iden phone with NFC