14 DAY TRIAL // Sprint Nextel announced that it will use QUALCOMM's QChat solution to provide high performance push-to-talk services to its customers. Currently, Sprint offers Nextel Walkie-Talkie push-to-talk services to customers on the Nextel National Network, and Qchat technology will allow Sprint to extend push-to-talk services to customers on the Nationwide Sprint PCS Network, as well as provide interoperable push-to-talk services between users on both networks.
Sprint also announced that Lucent Technologies are going to develop the necessary software and infrastructure to enable the new services to work on Sprint's CDMA2000 1xEV-DO Revision A network. In addition, Lucent Services is providing program management, end-to-end multi-vendor network integration, testing, operational readiness and deployment services to implement QChat.
QUALCOMM's QChat is a next-generation push-to-talk solution designed to deliver advanced walkie-talkie services optimized for CDMA2000 1xEV-DO Revision A wireless networks, as well as interoperability with the Nextel National Network. Qchat features a call set-up latency of less than one second between handsets and is expected to offer superior performance and bandwidth savings.
Sprint expects to begin offering high performance push-to-talk services using QChat in early 2008.