Chris: love your articles, and really enjoy listening to you and Sean on the podcast, but there's some cleaning up that needs to be done on this article.
Your tie in with the VZW CEO's comments made for a nice segue, but the texting issues on Boost/Nextel have nothing to do with capacity or a customer influx. That seems to be the newest excuse for this 4-year-old problem -- see Boost's PR guy on the Boost Facebook page. These texting problems have existed since Nextel launched MMS in 2004, and back then they blamed the delays on "too much text spam." Boost's variation, "we're just too successful to keep up," isn't any more true than the former excuse.
And while you're correct that iDEN wasn't originally built to do text messaging, that doesn't mean that texting on every iDEN network is unreliable. Southern LINC is an iDEN carrier in the southeastern US that has implemented an SMS gateway on their iDEN network, and it works very well for them. Nextel/Boost, with their MMS system managed by an (apparently) ineffective 3rd party provider, is the problem -- not iDEN.
Lastly, judging from all the discussion over on the Boost Mobile forum at HowardForums, I wouldn't say anything about the voice performance is "flawless." PTT, however, is still top notch.
@ED: Sprint Nextel has absolutely no plans to dismantle its iDEN network in "less than 360 days." If you're talking about the merger-era announcement about supporting iDEN till 2010, that was pushed forward to 2012 soon after, and then to "indefinitely" after they couldn't find a buyer for iDEN.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
VCI_Cell @ May 2nd 2009 1:13PM
Chris: love your articles, and really enjoy listening to you and Sean on the podcast, but there's some cleaning up that needs to be done on this article.
Your tie in with the VZW CEO's comments made for a nice segue, but the texting issues on Boost/Nextel have nothing to do with capacity or a customer influx. That seems to be the newest excuse for this 4-year-old problem -- see Boost's PR guy on the Boost Facebook page. These texting problems have existed since Nextel launched MMS in 2004, and back then they blamed the delays on "too much text spam." Boost's variation, "we're just too successful to keep up," isn't any more true than the former excuse.
And while you're correct that iDEN wasn't originally built to do text messaging, that doesn't mean that texting on every iDEN network is unreliable. Southern LINC is an iDEN carrier in the southeastern US that has implemented an SMS gateway on their iDEN network, and it works very well for them. Nextel/Boost, with their MMS system managed by an (apparently) ineffective 3rd party provider, is the problem -- not iDEN.
Lastly, judging from all the discussion over on the Boost Mobile forum at HowardForums, I wouldn't say anything about the voice performance is "flawless." PTT, however, is still top notch.
@ED: Sprint Nextel has absolutely no plans to dismantle its iDEN network in "less than 360 days." If you're talking about the merger-era announcement about supporting iDEN till 2010, that was pushed forward to 2012 soon after, and then to "indefinitely" after they couldn't find a buyer for iDEN.