Nextel: Taxi Dispatch Frequencies, a Forced Chirp and the Sprint Shutdown

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In 1987, telecom lawyers Morgan O'Brien and Chris Rogers and investment bankers Brian McAuley and Peter Reinheimer founded Fleet Call. Rather than bid for costly cellular spectrum, they bought 800 MHz specialized mobile radio frequencies set aside for fleet dispatch such as taxis, delivery trucks and plumbers. With Motorola they built iDEN, a TDMA digital network, and renamed the company Nextel in 1993. Because the spectrum was licensed for dispatch, the FCC required a push-to-talk function; Nextel fought the mandate, lost, and sold the feature as Direct Connect, an instant half-duplex link with no ringing. Craig McCaw invested in 1995, alongside Mark Warner and Jack Markell.

Nextel's digital signals bled into police, fire and ambulance radios sharing the 851 to 861 MHz range, and in August 2004 the FCC approved rebanding: Nextel gave up channels below 862 MHz, moved to 862 to 869 MHz behind a guard band, and received 2 GHz spectrum as compensation. Strained by rebanding costs and 3G pressure, Nextel merged with Sprint in August 2005. Sprint's CDMA network could not merge with iDEN, and in October 2005 Sprint removed WiDEN data from Nextel towers. The NASCAR Nextel Cup, which replaced Winston as title sponsor in 2004, became the Sprint Cup in 2008, and the iDEN network went dark at 12:01 a.m. on June 30, 2013.

• Nextel had the first nationwide digital cellular footprint and was the first carrier to build GPS into its phones.
• Nextel sued Verizon over push-to-talk advertising in 2003 and settled the following year.
• Sprint's rival ReadyLink ran on SIP, which could take several seconds to connect a call.
• Direct Talk let Nextel phones work off-network using frequency hopping in the unlicensed 900 MHz ISM band.
• WiDEN, supported by the Motorola i850, i860, i870 and i880, raised packet data speeds to 90 kilobits per second.