I have been wondering and wanted some input about Nextel and PTT. First of all a little background. I am a construction superintendent for a large homebuilder and I use my Nextel 7520 to the point that if i leave home and forget it i have to drive all the way back home to get it or i literally cannot function throughout the day. Whether it be communicating with my colleagues or my contractors. Being an admitted tech junkie i am always looking at the new phones coming out from other providers and seeing the available features. I wanted to start a discussion with other people that for business reasons cannot go without thier nextels and what the effects would be of switching to CDMA. I have thought about just cutting my nextel down to just PTT and getting a cingular BB or something to that effect but i also use my Nextel as my personal phone and really do not want to go through the hassle of giving out a new phone number or DC number to my 500+ contacts (or carrying two phones). For this reason I think i am stuck with the nextel. Also my contractors and the rest of the construction industry as im guessing are not going to readily switch to CDMA and for the most part all i have are thier DC numbers. So basically, in your opinion am i SOL? Not to mention what is posted all over this site about the DOOMED future of Nextel.

I unfortunatly am in the same boat. I am the Director of Quality assurance for two states and I am forced to keep nextel due to having to communicate with my trade partners. I have thought about cutting my service back to BB and DC only (only becuase I am locked in till october)and going with cingular or verizon for phone service.

Okay with that if I did that Dawg, now that they have phone number transferring and all throughout providers could i keep my same DC# and put my phone number on a verizon t-mobile, etc....account? I just really dont want to look like one of those guys with four phones on thier belt. (ill apologize in advance if i offended anybody)

I dont see any reason you couldnt I just dont want to pay more than one provider. Even if we switch to sprint we still have another bill to deal with.

Thats true and i was looking yesterday and sprint really doesnt have a blackberry i want so if i did switch it would be tmobile or cingular. I think tmobile is the cheapest.

yeah if I am going to get a reg phone then I am def leaving the sprint nextel side. With 306K people exiting nextel 4th quarter I am really surprised nothing more is going on.

I really think sprint as a whole is on the way out. And they are definately giving up on nextel. Not to stereotype but in my field of work the "old salty roughneck construction guys" everybody uses nextel but there are a great many that still have the "brick" and as long as they still get the chirp really dont care what else it does. Most probably have no idea that nextel could be gone all together therefore the majority is not motivating sprint/nextel to come out with better phones/technology. And besides that post in the "New Nextel" string about sprint and the evil empire is mostly true. I left sprint for cingular awhile back because the coverage sucked as did the customer service.

My company stayed with Nextel for the PTT feature for years. Last year we left as we have grown and many of our customers are off the beaten path and we got no service with Nextel. We miss the PTT but I would rather have phone service and Cingular coverage blew the socks off Nextel.

We tried PTT at Cingular and canceled PTT in less than a week. Horrible!

Just be sure you know you are getting what you want in terms of being able to take your phone number but leave the DC#. If I remember correctly, I've heard many times that these are connected....when you cancel/port your phone number out, this takes the DC# away too. Just be sure to speak with retentions and have notes on your account as well as names and contact info if you decide to go that route. I can easily see that turning into a, for lack of a better term, cluster-****.

The iDEN DC #'s have nothing to do with the PTN of the device. They will be disconnected when the PTN is ported out. They can not be ported. A PTN must be active on a phone for DC to work.