The Nextel Geek

investmenttool.com technology journal

I am now officially a Nextel Geek. My office decided it was too hard to get a hold of me in urgent situations. The fact that they've had my Sprint PCS phone number on speed dial for nearly four years didn't effect their decision. The office has Nextel's direct connect service for certain technical reason and last week I joined the club.

I run my organizations most important legacy servers. For years there has been an issue with what happens when a machine goes down. In the case of our Microsoft servers a network management machine pops an email to the responsible party. This message triggers a page that says "the machine is down, go fix it".

Its nice. For $2 a month my employer could have purchased 100 text messages on my Sprint PCS phone to let me know when there were issues with my two servers. Nope, lets spend $75 a month and give him a standard Nextel handset.

So last week, the big managers got a pair of Motorola i90 phones and passed down their used phones to me and a colleague of mine. I ended up with a Motorola i85 phone. Obsolete, and scratched up, but a pretty reasonable phone all things considered.

The Nextel service was extremely good, in fact superior to Sprint. Every single test call and incoming call went through, none ended up in voicemail. Pages worked quickly, getting through in a minute or so. The direct connect voice feature worked all over the city without a problem.

In a representative test, a drive through many part of Chicago, the voice quality of the Nextel system topped Sprints as well. The only disadvantage is the service is much more expensive for a lot less minutes.

The moral of the story is you sometimes get what you pay for. In Chicago, if you are willing to spend more than 100% more than comparable service, it would seem that Nextel is the gold standard in mobile phone service.

Not that that says a whole lot.

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Shmuel Protter
investmenttool.com

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