Zac Bowling’s Blog

Sprint, Nextel merger to close gap with larger rivals - Dec. 15, 2004

This is where I can really have a good opinion. I work as a 3rd party application developer for Nextel based solutions and I’m a indirect dealer for Nextel. So what do I think? I don’t know.

The merger between AT&T Wireless and Cingular was a good one. They both use the same technology. Sprint and Nextel is a little bit scarier. Nextel uses the iDEN protocol, which is an old two way technology that Motorola designed in the early 90s and uses the 800-900mhz band. Sprint uses PCS technology which runs in the 2.1-2.5ghz band (depending on if you have a dual band, first gen, or second gen phone). Nextel also can only purchase phones from Motorola since Motorola owns all the patents on iDEN protocol.

Nextel has been feeling the burn of no competition over their protocol from multiple venders. I has been hurting them. Phones from Nextel cost four times more then similar GSM phones and Motorola not being pressured by competition has been long on development. Nextel just now got a camera phone.

Nextel hated it so they even tried to merge with Motorola but where shot down because of other iDEN carriers in Canada, Brazil, and other countries thought it would be to much of a competition issue.

Nextel has been stuck as Motorola’s b**ch for a long time and they hate staying there. They even went out and did some illegal messing with their signal in the 800-900mhz band to force the government to give them a band in the 2.4ghz range so they could use the more industry wide GSM protocols and buy phones from more manufactures. Traditionally 800-900mhz was used for private radio operators, but now mostly used by Nextel and emergency services systems. Nextel fiddled with the filters on their towers so their customers would overlap over the emergency service bands and cause interference. That is why the FCC didn’t want any cell phone carriers in that band but since Nextel evolved into cell phones they let them stay. The government gave Nextel a few 2.4 ghz bands in some cities but not anything near what they need to cover the US like their ~800 mhz bands did.

Nextel in a bind and the merge between AT&T and Cingular being such a big pressing deal, they went out in search of a partner to help them coupe. Here comes Sprint to the rescue. With the value of both companies about the same and good overlapping coverage areas, it was a good choice.

What’s the problem? Incompatible protocols. You can’t “dual band” over iDEN and PCS. You would need chips in the phone to handle both protocols. iDEN is completely different from PCS. They will need to choose which protocol is best or they will have a big engineering feat to overcome. Its going to be interesting.

The funny part about all of this is my position. I write GPS tracking software for Nextel phones. Remember back in the 90s when all the E911 laws were being passed? Well one rule said that any cell phone sold by 2005 must be able to be located if that phone goes into emergency mode (someone dials 911). This was something the GSM carriers could solve by doing tower locates and triangulation. For Nextel this wasn’t really possible. Remember how I told you that GSM and PCS run between 2.1 and 2.5 ghz? Well the 2.1 to 2.5ghz bands suck on distance and doesn’t pass through walls very easily, so the carriers have to put lots of towers within just a few miles of each other. Nextel runs in 800-900mhz. This is awesome for distance and passing through almost anything, so Nextel only had to put up a fraction of the towers that the other guys did. This makes triangulation an issue.

So what did Nextel do? They had Motorola install a GPS chip in every phone. This little change was huge for people like me. I can write software that runs on these phones to relay the current position of the phone back all through-out the day.

These means I’m waiting to see Nextel’s next move. Will they still keep the commitment to allow tracking on the up and coming PCS/iDEN hybrid models?

oh me oh my.

– UPDATE –
(more…)

This is just amazing. With the Mono project making .NET possible on Linux and Mac, the ablity of .NET just went up a bunch. Since the Linux guys couldn’t really wrap Windows.Forms they decided to wrap GTK since it can work on an OS on its own. Out born GTK#. Now Windows developers can take advantage of GTK by just installing GTK# devel. It will even intergrate into Visual Studio to give you a much more powerful graphics and gui system then what standard Windows Forms provide. Check it out at:
http://gtk-sharp.sourceforge.net/

I’ve been busy.

First off. I’ve been working on the nasty but widely used subset of popular technologies that Microsoft thinks it has a right to call a protocol, and to which I say “HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA”.

I’ve learned this bloated, nasty, retarded, dumber then shit so called “protocol”. Microsoft wants every device to impliement this “protocol” so that XP can auto detect devices on your network and software companies can write generic software to control anyone of these Microsoft conforming devices with only a few lines of code only if they are running in Windows further propogating the Microsoft control on the world.

Everyone knows it. However, since the most significant devices to released on the market are consumer routers, most of them are starting to support the Internet Gateway Device specification for UPnP. The great part is that its a standarization of doing common functions between these devices. Thats it. I know there is a better way this could be done, but this works good enough. You can call some the basic functions provided by most of these devices, like port forwarding through your NAT, quering your external IP, and getting a callback when your ISP connection fails.

What I’m getting at is that I’ve reversed engineered what it takes to support these devices with this functions in your code. I’ve sumbited this documenation to various places in the hopes that software will start to implimenet these interfaces to allow NAT transversal automaticly while behind these devices so that people can make client to client connections (like some type of direct file transfer system or allow Direct Connections in your AIM communications).

You can read more about this here.
sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=6059000&forum_id=9587