perhaps not collapse but certainly not in good shape as they just announced cutting upwards of 5000 jobs.

They are the only major carrier to have lost customers last year. and they lost big, nearly a quarter of a million customers

well, the gain by the other networks would have to come from another, would'nt it?!?!

generally speaking the gain is from new customers. The american mobile market is still trending upwards from new customers. Most carriers even if they have a bad year gain a few customers. This was a significant drop to one of the nations main carriers.

I think one of the many reasons sprint sucks so much is because it seems ever since they grapped nextel, there customer service went right down the drain, when I felt like that used to be a staple of there service. That is why I left them.

QChat is a system designed between Qualcomm, Moto, and Sprint/Nextel. Believe me, Sprint is not on the verge of collapse.

QChat has nothing to do with the antiquated 'Ready-Link' system. Also, ready link isn't very slow. Granted, not as fast as DC, but still almost immediate.

The Nextel side of the house is getting slimmed down but isn't disappearing for quite a while. There may not be many new phones coming out like i335 or i570, but a couple. After the release of QChat, the selection and sales-direction will be placed more on that instead of new lines of service or upgrades.

What we all need to do is dig up some news on a QChat enabled Blackberry and be happy. Sprint may have crappy customer service over the phone, but they offer plenty of advantages over the competition.

Wouldn't this be on par with serving dinner on the Titanic?

Sprint announces massive layoffs, store closings amid subscriber defection - Engadget

One of the reasons of closing down so many stores is because the indirect stores are performing better then a lot of corporate stores. And with the customer service, as bad is it is, wouldn't you want to get rid of those bad apples?

I would hope Sprint would offer some kind of rebate/trade in for current users who want to transition from Nextel to regular Sprint. Do they have anything like that currently?

Unfortunately not. Right now, the biggest deal Nextel users get for switching to the CDMA side is no ETF if they are in contract. I really wish that something would be offered that could assist the customers.

Nextel is not completely dead, in some areas they are STILL seperate entities, and we are getting no word past that. So there are still a lot of issues as far as that. We only sell Nextel ( and Alltel which is quickly becoming our larger of the 2 ) but our service reps are suffering greatly for Nextel.

sorry about that Melanie. I hope you can land on your feet.

I still find it amusing that this (see attachment) was actually their slogan for a while. Little did they know that it would come true with such a different meaning than what they intended...

None of the DC clones are as good as DC.

We have some cingular flip phones here with walkie talkie and it is slow and annoying. You have to hold the button down for sometimes as long as 10 seconds before you are clear to talk. And when the other person gets your message is anyone's guess. I stood by someone and tried it and it took about 30 seconds from me holding down the button, waiting, talking, waiting, until they got the message.

With DC I can stand by someone and there is at most a .5 to 1 second delay.

Well, hopefully Qualcomm's QChat will have better network utilization then Ready-Link did back in the day. Even Ready-Link wasn't terribly slow unless you were roaming or in an overly populated area.

Sprint has increased their backbone a good bit in the last couple of years and these improvements (pre wimax) should help with the new DC option.

I really hope that in the future (by the time I need a new BlackBerry) Sprint has push to talk that works with Nextel. My whole family has Nextel and we like the push to talk feature.... sometimes.

The rumour I have been hearing/seeing is that the release of the Curve is being held off in favor of adding QChat to it, but from what I can see is that it is all speculation. Haven't seen any proof yet.

Qchat operates over the WiMAX frequency (or XOHM) and therefore Qchat enabled phones will be available to consumers when that aspect of the network is fully functional. WiMAX is off the charts beyond standard EVDO in terms of speed. That is why Qchat can connect as fast or faster than current Direct Connect. It will be late 2009 or early 2010 before this is available nationwide.

QChat infrastructe is already up and ready to go in most places. We (at my store) were hoping for the slated release of Q1 2008. With a little over a month to get everything to the stores and personnel trained, it looks like it will most likely be late in Q2 of this year at the earliest.

Wirelessly posted (BlackBerry 8100 Pearl: BlackBerry8100/4.2.1 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/100)

Nextel is definitely dead because NASCAR renamed the top series from the Nextel Cup to the Sprint Cup. ;-p