From Reuters NEW YORK (Reuters) - Sprint Nextel Corp (S.N: Quote, Profile, Research) said on Wednesday it does not expect any delay to its plan to launch QChat, a walkie-talkie cell phone service, despite a court ruling against QChat developer Qualcomm Inc (QCOM.O: Quote, Profile, Research). A federal judge in California on Monday barred Qualcomm from the U.S. sale of some products infringing three patents owned by rival Broadcom Corp (BRCM.O: Quote, Profile, Research) but said Qualcomm could sell some chips, including those supporting QChat, through a January 2009 "sunset" period if it pays royalties. "We're pleased the judge did not issue an immediate injunction on the patent related to QChat technology and we do not anticipate any interruption and delay in QChat deployment due to this dispute," Sprint spokesman Matthew Sullivan said. "We're still assessing the impact but at this time we think all our handset providers will be covered by the sunset provision," Sullivan said.
Wow I wasn't aware that this was part of the chips involved, good thing they have till 2009 and by then I am sure they will have a workaround.
When is QChat supposed to launch? It seems like this would be more desirable than trying to sell people iden/cdma combo phones.
Though it's only a rumor, I've heard around the latter 2nd quarter, possibly 3rd quarter this year. But I'll believe it when I see it.
On a completely unrelated Nextel note. Anyone heard how the rebanding is going? We've been told that a number of our Nextel problem are because the rebanding has constrained their spectrum, at least locally.
Depends on where your at. Some area Sprint cant overlay with CDMA due there already being an affliliate in the area like alot of the Midwest area.
As RadioFoneGuy stated it does depend on where you live, also Boost has been putting a strain on their network big time the closer to cities you are. A possible suggestion is the Buzz or similar dual mode phones, depending on how much the DC is needed or used, for us it has been helpful when the DC doesn't work to still be able to call the other party & SMS is done over CDMA vs iDEN so they have been more reliable for us.
We're on the outskirts of Grand Rapids so there are a number of possible reasons for our problems. We use a huge amount of direct connect so we've been tolerating it so far. They have improved things though. One big they did for us was put a system in one of our main buildings so now that building at least has good coverage. They also claim to have fixed a problem with one their towers after several months of us complaining. Whatever they did it improved our coverage some more. We've only got one small building that's terrible. I'm not really sure I'd want to spend money to improve their coverage and we don't have enough lines with Nextel to ask for another in building system.
You fall into that iPCS catagory unfortunately, as I believe they have the license for that for Sprint. Anywhere iPCS is Sprint cant offer their corporate service so they have to keep the iDEN running as is for now. iPCS has causes alot of legal grief for Sprint and IMO it would be cheaper to buy them out then deal with the paper trail and legal fees.
IMO this Qchat is only 2 years late in the making. I think they should of had something comparable within a year of the Nextel take over.
I agree, but it doesn't surprise me how long it's taken considering the amount of things Sprint has going on right now.
I agree! However, Q-Chat was available a couple of years ago. I believe Sprint was faced with either trying to migrate the Nextellers over to Q-chat on Sprint's EvDO rev 0 network, or waiting until rev A was rolled out nationwide. I think they decided the two-year delay was a better alternative than a Readylink-like (slow connect-time) Rev 0 solution.
thats what i've been hearing as well....... yes the rebanding has caused spectrum to be constrained......its ashame but it is motivation to get off iDEN asap which is a GOOD thing yeah mostly cuz they thought they could make QChat work on EV-DO Rev 0 and it didnt work in lab tests.......no we're on Rev A and hopefully it will work well.....if not on to Rev B
