I have switched from Sprint to Nextel

[AnthroMatt]

I was fed up with lousy Sprint coverage at my house, so I made the switch over to Nextel now that Sprint allows iden and CDMA devices to share minutes on the same plan.

So far so good. It's only been about 20 hours though!

[Eric47]

nice. i always felt Nextel coverage was better, the main difference though is that Sprint is going to have better roaming, and in some places, EV-DO. but if your voice only and like beefy phones it is going to be a good fit.

Good Luck!

[Quint101]

Nextel has more reach in these parts as well in the panhandle, they cover areas that Sprint won't cover for ages to come... Is there a particular reason why Sprint hasn't colocated onto the Nextel sites?

Hopefully, AnthroMatt will have something that works...

It would've been nice if the hybrid phones would have supported 850 roaming, although the technology limits this, IIRC.

[AnthroMatt]

Originally Posted by Quint101

Nextel has more reach in these parts as well in the panhandle, they cover areas that Sprint won't cover for ages to come... Is there a particular reason why Sprint hasn't colocated onto the Nextel sites?

Hopefully, AnthroMatt will have something that works...

It would've been nice if the hybrid phones would have supported 850 roaming, although the technology limits this, IIRC.

So far so good. It's only been a bit more than a day, but I am enjoying having reliable service at home and so far I haven't encountered any bad spots around town.

Sprint is on most of the Nextel sites near me. In fact, aside from a site they share about a mile from my house. Sprint actually has two closer sites (1 tower and 1 repeater) than Nextel. For whatever combination of reasons though, Nextel is great and Sprint is lousy.

[WumpusVA]

Honestly, after being on Sprint I don't see how I could ever go back to being on just straight Nextel. I suppose I would be okay if I only needed my phone for voice... but Texting and Data usage on iDen would kill me.

Have you considered trying Airave? It's supposed to come out in the coming days... that might be worth a shot.

[AnthroMatt]

Originally Posted by WumpusVA

Honestly, after being on Sprint I don't see how I could ever go back to being on just straight Nextel. I suppose I would be okay if I only needed my phone for voice... but Texting and Data usage on iDen would kill me.

Have you considered trying Airave? It's supposed to come out in the coming days... that might be worth a shot.

The texting is a bit odd, but it has worked well enough so far, cumbersome though it may be.

Agreed...the slow speed of data will take some getting used to, but since I could only get 1X CDMA service in my house (despite being in a Rev A area), I really won't miss it much. Around town all I ever use data for is to check sports scores and do email. Both of which are tolerable, especially when using the GMail java app.

As for Airave...it's nice in theory, but I don't want to pay $30 more each month to Sprint in order to supplement their poor coverage.

[djjim]

Originally Posted by AnthroMatt

As for Airave...it's nice in theory, but I don't want to pay $30 more each month to Sprint in order to supplement their poor coverage.

I thought you only had to pay the 30 bucks if you wanted unlimited ld from home. Can't you buy it for just the improved coverage?

[AnthroMatt]

Originally Posted by djjim

I thought you only had to pay the 30 bucks if you wanted unlimited ld from home. Can't you buy it for just the improved coverage?

Maybe so. I know little about Airave to be honest. But the same principle applies. I am not going to fork over my money to "fix" Sprint's shortcomings.

[larry]

Originally Posted by Quint101

Is there a particular reason why Sprint hasn't colocated onto the Nextel sites?

Sprint has co-located on many of the Nextel sites already. They've chosen the ones that they felt were the most needed and made them first priority. But no matter how many IDEN sites Sprint adds CDMA to there will never be an exact match in coverage. The CDMA panels are often set up differently than the IDEN panels using different azimuths (directional beams). Plus the frequency difference can also be a factor. That doesn't mean that IDEN coverage will always be better either. There will be many places where the CDMA side will be better.

[AnthroMatt]

Originally Posted by larry

There will be many places where the CDMA side will be better.

Yeah...I am fully aware I have given up much more overall coverage in order to get better coverage locally where I use my phone the most.

The difference is that if I know my phone won't work, it is hard to get too upset about it. When I am somewhere I feel my phone should work well (my house in Arizona's 3rd largest city), it is very frustrating when it will not.

And since Sprint seems to be moving away from allowing forced roaming on handsets now, I decided to make the switch.

[larry]

Originally Posted by AnthroMatt

Yeah...I am fully aware I have given up much more overall coverage in order to get better coverage locally where I use my phone the most.

The difference is that if I know my phone won't work, it is hard to get too upset about it. When I am somewhere I feel my phone should work well (my house in Arizona's 3rd largest city), it is very frustrating when it will not.

And since Sprint seems to be moving away from allowing forced roaming on handsets now, I decided to make the switch.

Matt I think you're problem is that repeater there. I've seen some repeaters actually make the signal worse if it's interfering with another site causing pilot pollution. If Sprint had installed a full blown site instead of just a repeater I bet you would have had better results.

[AnthroMatt]

Originally Posted by larry

Matt I think you're problem is that repeater there. I've seen some repeaters actually make the signal worse if it's interfering with another site causing pilot pollution. If Sprint had installed a full blown site instead of just a repeater I bet you would have had better results.

Interesting. You are probably right about that too. I bet the repeater cannot do EVDO (though maybe it can...I know very little about the technical aspect). If the repeater only works on 1X voice channels it might explain why my service would continuously go from EVDO to 1X to no service and back around again.

[Eric47]

the only company that uses repeaters (that i know of) in my area is Cricket... that is rather low buck to use repeaters..

Nextel has always been a solid company, im not going to re-hash this debate, but i still stand firm that IMO Nextel went south when Sprint bought them and sat them on the back burner and never converting them to CDMA.

at any rate, for Voice only, they are still hard to beat, reception is good here for them, except in the country, then pretty much everyone has them beat...though ive noticed on certain military installations (a few that are VERY rural) they have some of the best coverage...so it all depends i guess.

[larry]

Originally Posted by AnthroMatt

Interesting. You are probably right about that too. I bet the repeater cannot do EVDO (though maybe it can...I know very little about the technical aspect). If the repeater only works on 1X voice channels it might explain why my service would continuously go from EVDO to 1X to no service and back around again.

Sprint only has 31 repeaters in the entire Phoenix metro market. That probably includes sprint store repeaters (some stores have them). So I think you just got very unlucky winding up near a repeater. Whether or not that's messing with your EV-DO signal I can't say for sure. But I know someone on here who should be able to tell you.

Originally Posted by Eric47

Nextel has always been a solid company, im not going to re-hash this debate, but i still stand firm that IMO Nextel went south when Sprint bought them and sat them on the back burner and never converting them to CDMA.

From what I observed Sprint actually invested heavily into the IDEN system after the merger. In fact there was a time when the majority of new sites going up were IDEN only which kind of annoyed me since I thought CDMA should have been the top priority. The IDEN engineers were working seperately from the CDMA engineers for a long time in making their own network improvements. It would have been too much of a burden to try to convert the IDEN system to CDMA in that short of time period. The IDEN PTT system was still superior to anything that CDMA had. It's not easy to combine two totally incompatible technologies and now that they have Qchat available I think the time has finally come to start phasing out IDEN for good and/or selling that part of the company off to someone else.

[RadioFoneGuy]

Repeaters can be a pain, depending on local and the type of equipment being used.

Most repeaters have to be programmed to match the donor tower, sector, PN, carrier group ETC and some are what I call dumb repeaters and just amplify anything.

Sometimes network management will do a frequency retune of the network to clear up crowding issues or add additional capacity and forget to program the reapeater to match the changes.

IPCS in my area uses alot of repeaters and they swear by them as the output power is about 5 watts more that a regular cabinet.

Sprint is probably using an Andrews Repeater which is pretty decent stuff.

I dont know if they support EVDO it depends on how old the repeater is.

[larry]

Sprint installed a repeater here in the city of Orange about 2 years ago and it worked for about 1 month. Then it stopped working and was dead for an astounding 5 months before they finally realized it wasn't working and fixed it (despite my repeated attempts to tip them off about it). It does feed from a donor site and they did program it correctly but the donor site is much too far away to be very effective. So basically this repeater boosts coverage to just one very small shopping center.

[spleck]

Originally Posted by Eric47

Nextel has always been a solid company, im not going to re-hash this debate, but i still stand firm that IMO Nextel went south when Sprint bought them and sat them on the back burner and never converting them to CDMA.

At the time QChat was "right around the corner", but it took forever to show up. I think Qualcomm is to blame for that--and it hurt the Nextel CDMA plans.

[RadioFoneGuy]

Sprint actually did alot of work to the Nextel only towers in my area. They spent millions upgrading capacity and equipment and even add a few towers. Sprint did more with the Nextel network in my area in a year than Nextel did in the previous 5 years by themselves.

Its easy to point fingers but both Nextel and Sprint are to blame really. Nextel had some of the best customer loyalty and the lowest churn but they didnt stay on top of technology progression. All the other carriers were boasting more features and higher speads and Motorola the sole provider of iDEN couldnt match what GSM and CDMA are able to achieve. Even WiDEN speeds would make GPRS feel like broadband. We debate about Sprint and Nextel back and forth but alot of times we forget to think of the heartache the employees have to go thru.

Larry,

The repeaters can be linked with Alarms back to the Switch or NOC by using just a plain old POTS line but most of the time their not. Alltel has one out on an island in my area, but the tech told me he hadnt been out there in 2 years. Repeaters sometimes lock up or overheat and need to be turned off and on. I have one on another island thats owned by a rich guy and he's the alarm system, cause if it acts up you will definately hear about it.