That Blackberry in Your Hand

That sprint/nextel blackberry in your hand is going to get superceded. I found out that Motorola has stopped production of the IDEN chipset for commercial use. Sprint/ Nextel is soon to become just Sprint.

First response in America is a mesh of different channels - A company I knew really wanted to integrate them all into a single channel. What looks like one channel to the Police, and another to the Firemen, etc. could end up being a pretty big ROI for the country. Classic example - simple auto accident- might involve two branches of local government, the Police and Fire/Paramedical.

Alot of the value of the IDEN network right now is that its Push to Talk feature has very little latency. If you key up a Motorola from Sprint/Nextel , almost immediately you get a response from anywhere in the world. So construction workers really use this feature and it works for them.

But what you don't get, from say, Verizon Wireless - is that same immediate response. Thats kind of important if its half duplex communications - you can press a Verizon key push to talk on a Blackberry and it will lag.

Lag is important. Its the reason why I stopped playing Second Life, really. I think its a deal breaker right now for the Sprint/ Verizon technology of WCDMA PTT that will make their push-to-talk a bit more ugly than the IDEN that current exists. So the Feds will likely make a move to snarf up the IDEN/ Nextel unit of Sprint/Nextel and that will mean that Sprint will be free to collapse to a unified specification.

But Bellsouth/ ATT will not follow suit. They are GSM and so is the rest of the world. What will have to happen in America to defragment the market is this Blackberry that you have in your hand go from IDEN (if its a Sprint) or WCDMA ( if its a Verizon) to GSM and to 3G .

There is analogy I like to use when we talk about fragmented markets and how America is trying to compete given the internecine competition within our borders regarding standards. Lets say national infrastructure for Cellular networking, is like a car. Ok. If you're in Japan - you get to sit down in a comfortable hybrid that cuts off when you don't use it, runs quietly and has a clear display. Everyone else on the starting line has to start way back. Comes with a zen sandbox in the ashtray. Say you're a European Nation, you get a nice German car thats fairly inexpensive, runs well, and you can take it as fast as you like but its a toll road. So. Suppose you're America.

You get into the car, and they bolt you in and you can't exit for two years. Then they remove your instrument panel and install a tractor engine in the front of the car and a propeller on the back and kids in tricycles pass you.

That Blackberry you have in your hand will one day be on one standard. The Sprint/Nextel deal is going down. Word.