Nextel plans Smartphone, Wi-Fi phones

NEW ORLEANS -- Nextel Communications by next year will offer a mobile phone with Motorola  based on Microsoft's Windows Powered Smartphone platform, and in the second quarter of this year the carrier will begin trials with a phone that can be used on Wi-Fi wireless LANs, a Nextel executive said here Sunday.

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The Smartphone device will support tri-band GSM/GPRS (Global System for Mobile Communications/General Packet Radio Service) as well as Nextel's iDEN (Integrated Digital Enhanced Network) infrastructure, according to Barry West, executive vice president and chief technology officer of Nextel, in an interview following a Nextel briefing.

The mobile operator, based in Reston, Va. , concentrates on providing advanced services to government and business clients. That approach has helped it gain market share and maintain strong revenue and margins, executives said at the briefing, held here on the eve of the CTIA Wireless trade show.

Nextel and Schaumburg, Ill.-based Motorola also are working on a mobile phone with integrated Wi-Fi wireless LAN capability, which will allow users to make calls over a home or office Wi-Fi network and use the same phone to call over the iDEN network while on the road, West said.

Although it couldn't truly roam from one type of network to the other, this phone could allow customers to replace a cordless phone or a wired PBX (private branch exchange) with a wireless LAN, West said. A call initiated on the iDEN network would stay on that network when the user got to the office, but a call begun on the Wi-Fi network would be dropped once the user moved out of range, he said.

Nextel also could work with providers of cable data services to send phone calls from the Wi-Fi network over the cable infrastructure instead of the traditional telecommunications network, West said. He would not comment on whether Nextel is in talks with any cable providers about the plan. Nextel might share with the cable provider the access fee that the user paid.

True handoffs of voice calls between Wi-Fi and cellular networks pose big technology problems because Wi-Fi technology is designed to be inexpensive and relatively simple, West said. Cellular technologies each have built into them special standards to allow handoffs as users move around, and those specifications weren't built in to the IEEE 802.11 standard on which Wi-Fi products are based.

CTIA Wireless, sponsored by the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association, runs from Monday through Wednesday.