Sprint Announces Push-to-Talk Upgrade, Nextel Death

Public safety agencies using Sprint Nextel‘s iDen push-to-talk service will be offered a substantial service upgrade later this year, but only if they upgrade to new CDMA handsets before iDen base stations are turned off in 2013. The company said the new push-to-talk handsets will be available in the fourth quarter of 2011, and will cover triple the area of the current service and improve in-building coverage “significantly.” Voice and data capacity, and data speeds will also increase with the new handsets. Sprint said the handsets will have “most” of the current Sprint push-to-talk features, and will include a rugged flip phone by Motorola and a smartphone by Kyocera. The devices will feature push-to-talk for up to 200 participants, what Sprint calls “Land Mobile Radio (LMR) interoperability,” and availability notification. More features, including international push-to-talk, will arrive in 2012, the company said. The company didn’t provide an exact date for unplugging the iDen network, but said it would occur in 2013, “as the customer base shifts to more broadband-centric push-to-talk applications on the CDMA network.” Nextel handsets and its push-to-talk technology have been adopted by thousands of public safety agencies in the U.S., both as a alternate and back-up for the agencies’ two-way radio systems. Agencies like the private and encrypted nature of Nextel transmissions, but critics note that communications are not recorded, there is a monthly, per-handset fee and that service quality is beyond a subscriber’s control. Read the company’s press release on the announcement here.