Sprint to use Qualcomm QChat for PTT between CDMA & iDEN

Sprint Nextel Plans Push-2-Talk on its CDMA Network

Sprint Nextel has announced an agreement to use Qualcomm's QChat solution to provide push-to-talk services to its CDMA based customers. Sprint, which currently offers the Nextel Walkie-Talkie push-to-talk service, says that it also expects to utilize QChat technology to provide interoperable push-to-talk services between users on both networks.

Sprint also announced that it has selected Lucent Technologies to develop software and infrastructure necessary to enable the new services to work throughout Sprint's CDMA2000 1xEV-DO Revision A network. In addition, Lucent Services is providing program management, end-to-end multi-vendor network integration, testing, operational readiness and deployment services to implement QChat.

Developed by Qualcomm, QChat is a push-to-talk solution designed to deliver walkie-talkie services optimized for CDMA2000 1xEV-DO Revision A wireless networks, as well as interoperability with the Nextel National Network. Featuring a call set-up latency of less than one second between handsets, QChat is expected to offer exceptional call set-up performance and bandwidth savings in comparison to other walkie-talkie approaches.


"Sprint is committed to providing innovative tools that empower our customers to do what they want, when they want," said Iyad Tarazi, vice president of network development for Sprint. "The work we are doing with Qualcomm and Lucent represents a milestone in our strategy of offering all our customers a high performance push-to-talk service that they can set-up and connect in under a second no matter which of our networks they are on."

Sprint expects to begin offering high performance push-to-talk services using QChat in early 2008. Sprint, Lucent and Qualcomm recently completed successful trials using pre-production handsets, commercial-grade lab systems and EV-DO Revision A field sites.

Commercial availability of the high performance push-to-talk service will follow Sprint's upgrade of its Power Vision Network to the faster EV-DO Revision A technology being rolled out later this year.


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