Andre Yoskowitz
14 Apr 2012 16:04
Sprint has announced plans to recycle its old iDEN (push-to-talk) spectrum.
The spectrum will be used to help the company build its new 4G LTE network. iDEN currently uses 800MHz wireless spectrum, which will soon be used for Sprint's 4G.
iDEN users is down to an all-time low of 6 million as consumers run away in droves from the Nextel "push-to-talk" service. When the companies first merged in 2005, there were 20 million iDEN users.
Sprint's acquisition of Nextel is one of the bigger disasters in merger history, with Sprint having to take a loss of $29.7 billion on the deal in 2008. Nextel was purchased for $36 billion, so there was an 83 percent loss in just 3 years.
For the rest of the year, Sprint will retire 9,600 iDEN cell sites and then kill the rest next year. Anyone needing walkie talkie features will be migrated over to the CDMA-based Nextel Direct Connect service.