With a market value of $30.5bn, Nextel might be a target for a takeover after Cingular’s $41bn bid for AT&T Wireless left the remaining five major players aware that more deals are likely to be struck before long.
However, Nextel is a technological maverick that continues to go its own way and no company would relish the challenge of integrating its system with their own. Having shunned the two major cellular standards in favor of Motorola Inc’s integrated digital enhanced network technology, Nextel led the way with a push-to-talk system that its competitors are struggling to emulate.
Now Nextel is trialing start-up Flarion Technologies Inc’s Flash-OFDM system which is designed to provide an average downlink speed of 1.5Mbps, 50 times faster than a dial-up connection, and quicker than existing 3G technology.
Nextel increased subscribers by 21% to 12.9 million last year and aims to add a further 1.8 million in 2004. The 2003 figure excludes its youth-orientated Boost Mobile service which attracted 385,000 subscribers last year and is designed to give it a substantial foothold in a market sector that continues to grow.
This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire
