All About Nextel Phones

If you have ever seen a cell phone (and really, who hasn't by now) then you have surely seen a Nextel phone. They are widely used for their abilities as more of a long distance walkie-talkie then a cell phone, and the Nextel phone service is probably best known for their popular Push-To-Talk system of communication. Surely we have all seen the commercials, and most of us know at least one person who owns a Nextel phone - you might even own one yourself. But Nextel wasn't always this popular, and in fact it wasn't too long ago when Nextel Communications as a whole was completely unheard of.

History Of Nextel and the Nextel Phone

In 1987 a telecommunications lawyer named Morgan E. O'Brien founded a small company named FleetCall which specialized in taxi and other fleet dispatch services. Though these phones had their own frequency, they were not "cellular" phones in the sense that we know today. The push-to-talk system was included in FleetCall's original line, but it was only due to FCC requirement; the developers and designers at FleetCall did not particularly like the feature, which would later come to be known as "Direct Connect"; though this it is more widely recognized by the "chirp" or beep sound emitted when the talk button is pressed.

Six years later, in 1993 FleetCall was renamed Nextel Communications, and within 2 years they had receive a significant amount of investment capital, with the majority of funds coming from wireless pioneer Craig McCaw. And it wouldn't be long until the Nextel phone made its way into homes all across America.

Sprint And The Nextel Phone

By the end of August, 2005, over a decade after they were renamed and almost 2 decades after the company was initially founded, Nextel was purchased by Sprint for a price tag of $35 billion. There were plenty of mixed reactions about this announcement, but nobody can deny the positive impact that Sprint has had on the Nextel phone since the acquisition. To date Sprint Nextel boasts over 50.5 million customers, making them the 3^rd largest cell phone service provider in the nation. The merger also allows customers of one company to convert their cell phone plan to the other, in favor of more useful personal benefits. In the end, however, Sprint plans to completely absorb the Nextel phone and the Nextel name into their company by the year 2010.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_Nextel

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nextel