Sprint Proposes $2 Billion ‘Stimulus’ Project

Cellular provider Sprint Nextel Corp. has sent a letter to the Obama transition team proposing a $2 billion public safety “Emergency Response Team” based on the company’s iDEN radio and providing communications for local emergencies. The company said the team would respond to fires, floods, earthquakes and other major events to deploy radios and the infrastructure to support them. Under the proposal–which Sprint intends to operate–there would be 100 response vehicles and 100,000 radios to deploy to emergency incidents, all located at 40 sites across the country. Sprint said the 5-year contract to operate the system would be much less than the nationwide network proposed by Congress and the FCC, and could be funded out of the $825 billion financial stimulus package recently passed by Congress. The spectrum proposed for the nationwide radio network failed to receive a sufficiently-high bid when it was auctioned in Feb. 2008.