Nextel Moving Forward With Wide-Area Wireless Broadband
For a while, it was looking like Verizon Wireless was going to have the clear lead in true high speed cellular wireless broadband offerings. Sprint has said they’re going to take their time, and the various GSM players are all focusing on EDGE deployments before upping the speeds. However, no one’s been talking about Nextel, and according to this post at Slashdot, Nextel is getting ready to jump into the wide area wireless broadband space with Flash-OFDM technology. They’ve launched a pretty slick site about the service, and are even looking for testers (if you live in North Carolina). They’re claiming that it will offer average speeds of 1.5 Mbps downstream and 375 kbps upstream, with bursts hitting double those speeds (if history is any indicator, expect real speeds to be a bit slower, but it’s still impressive).