...but that must have been cool to hear that traffic in 2010. We seriously still need iDEN.
Many of us carried NexTel phones for years. They were a novelty at the time, but they did suck.
The original design of the system was two way radio, not phone. As they morphed it into a telephone service, audio quality suffered on the walkie talkie side as they chipped away at the bandwidth. Phone audio quality was not great, but passable.
The small speakers on the handsets didn't help. It was often difficult to understand what others were saying, especially with background noise. Before they tried to compete with the cell phone carriers, the system was a halfway decent two way radio service. But they used something that actually looked like a real two way radio, had a good antenna, big battery and decent audio.
They did away with those and started trying to play cell phone carrier, which generally wrecked the whole idea behind NexTel.
And the coverage was no where near what we have today. Around me, the system suffered from a lot of congestion, especially on the phone side. NexTel spent a lot of money installing bi-directional antenna systems in larger buildings to try and improve coverage, but BDA's create their own issues and they were generally hated by radio guys (as most BDA systems are). I got tired of the Nextel BDA's taking out my trunked system and thoroughly enjoyed going in the wiring closets and yanking the cords on them to shut them down.
It was very annoying, also. Some users always had them cranked up on speaker, and the annoying beep noise every time someone keyed up got old. People blasting the calls got to be old really quick and generally rude NexTel users were made fun of for being totally clueless in public.
It was a good product when they were doing radio service, but once they got the dollar signs in their eyes and tried to make it into a cell phone service, it needed to die.
