Government Threatens To Shut Down Sprint's iDEN Network

The correct name is Qchat... It is a form of High Performance Push-To-Talk. It does ride on EVDO Rev A or later. The Sprint network is almost completely overlaid with EVDO Rev A. Sprint is also adding towers to mask the entire footprint of what Iden now covers.

Also, the RevA EVD0 covers 220 markets and over 250 million people, much larger than the IDEN network.

The Sprint affiliate markets DO NOT have EVDO with the exception, I think, of Johnson City TN. This is quite a large footprint. I used to work for their biggest one Alamosa PCS. Sprint then bought us out in March 2006 and as of now the data network is still 1X and not EVDO or EVDO-REV A in these areas. Sprint does have a reverse data roaming agreement with Alltel who recently turned up EVDO in our area but it's slow compared to Sprint.

Very true. But then agian, VZW and Alltel affiliated markets DO NOT roam on the EVDO, you only get 1x. So whats the difference? Sprints own EVDO network does cover over 200 million people and climbing. Hopefully, one day, all networks will roam data just like voice.

What am I missing here? Sprint now OWNS Alamosa PCS....thus one would think it would be a priority to upgrade to EVDO.

Where the heck is Alamosa at? 🤣 What carrier offers high speed in rural areas? None, thats right 😲

But FYI, they are already upgrading their 1x towers to EVDO Rev 0 as apart of the WiMAX venture.

Do some research on Sprint and the affiliates they've acquired. Alamosa covers some pretty big markets in TX, NC, SC etc. You evidently haven't researched Verizon or Alltel as far as EVDO goes because they MOST CERTAINLY DO HAVE EVDO IN SOME OF THEIR RURAL MARKETS!

They are upgrading Alamosa PCS equipment... It just isnt a priority like the Legacy Sprint Network. If Alamosa wasn't so far behind the times, Sprint wouldn't have to be swinging traffic and upgrading all this equipment and it would be much quicker.

i can free roam off of the EVDO network in midland, MI

This is correct, Sprint is rolling affiliates to Sprint switches or completely upgrading the affiliates equipment. Sprint is also working on EVDO Roaming with Alltel. There is a known speed issue when roaming EVDO data.

The only reason I could guess for a speed issue would be that they only have EVDO Rev 0 and not Rev A or later.

How do you "roll" an affiliate to a Sprint switch?? The affiliates network is completely separate from Sprint. When I worked for Airgate PCS which was bought out by another Sprint affiliate Alamosa PCS everything we had was completely removed from Sprint. Whenever you'd travel out of our territory into Sprint's the call would always drop as it was unable to hand off to the sprint switch. You'd have to redial the call. When I left Sprint (which acquired the Alamosa markets in March 2006) in June of this year NOTHING had been done to upgrade the Alamosa network to EVDO. In fact Sprint hadn't even added a single cell site to our area since buying us out. You mention the speed issue with EVDO roaming. When I used to roam off of Alltel's EVDO (Sp...
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I agree on the commercial's about Sprint Speed in non EVDO areas, but this campaign is also targeting Push-to-talk and that is done pretty damn fast....

Rolling.... Well when you roll traffic from one piece of equipment to the next... Sprint is decommissioning alot of Affiliate switches and moving the circuits to a Sprint switch or in some cases upgrading the affiliate equipment. Rolling the traffic to Sprint switches is the best option because of the cost savings. You would lose building costs, labor costs, some access circuit costs, etc...

When you travel between a Sprint Affiliate network and the legacy Sprint network this is called a hard handoff because it is not from one cell tower to the next it is between switches and in a some...
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Grand Rapids, MI and Mt. Pleasant, MI both have EV-DO , SAginaw-BayCity- Midland should get EVDO in spring summer 08 and they are affiliate markets

Hell, even unincorporated Atlanta, MI, has EVDO now 😳. It just blows my mind when I see sparsely populated areas in the NE Lower Peninsula have EVDO (e.g., a spot between Hillman and Alpena), but areas along I-75 in that part don't yet.

That's great for people who switched, but again your forgetting the people who use older iDen phones, for people who don't want to switch to sprint for the ptt ability, boost is the way to go for PTT within the nextel network. I have Verizon for my main cell and Boost only for the PTT ability. That's awesome that Moto headsets are available for boost, but your still forgetting what boost came out with first, Pay as you go PTT for people who 1) Hate Sprint (like me)
2) Don't want a contact just for the PTT.

Stop thinking of the CDMA networks for a moment and think about the people who are still using BOOST for PTT (why they orginally bought it for).

Addtionally, Post a link to the Stat's from which you quoted me.