Sprint Nextel today announced an agreement to use QUALCOMM's QChat® solution to provide high performance push-to-talk services to its customers. Sprint, which currently offers the industry-leading Nextel Walkie-Talkie push-to-talk service to its customers on the Nextel National Network, expects to utilize QChat technology to extend high performance 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 it has selected Lucent Technologies to develop software and infrastructure necessary to enable the new services to work throughout Sprint's CDMA2000 1xEV-DO Revision A network. In addition, Lucent Services, one of the largest network integrators, is providing program management, end-to-end multi-vendor network integration, testing, operational readiness and deployment services to implement QChat.   

Sprint Nextel today announced an agreement to use QUALCOMM's QChat® solution to provide high performance push-to-talk services to its customers. Sprint, which currently offers the industry-leading Nextel Walkie-Talkie push-to-talk service to its customers on the Nextel National Network, expects to utilize QChat technology to extend high performance 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 it has selected Lucent Technologies to develop software and infrastructure necessary to enable the new services to work throughout Sprint's CDMA2000 1xEV-DO Revision A network. In addition, Lucent Services, one of the largest network integrators, is providing program management, end-to-end multi-vendor network integration, testing, operational readiness and deployment services to implement QChat.

Developed by QUALCOMM, 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. Featuring a call set-up latency of less than one second between handsets, QChat is expected to offer exceptional call set-up performance and bandwidth savings in comparison to other walkie-talkie approaches.

Sprint expects to begin offering high performance push-to-talk services using QChat in early 2008. Sprint, Lucent and QUALCOMM recently completed successful trials using pre-production handsets, commercial-grade lab systems and EV-DO Revision A field sites.

Commercial availability of the high performance push-to-talk service will follow Sprint's upgrade of its Power Vision Network to the faster EV-DO Revision A technology being rolled out later this year. In addition to enabling high-performance push-to-talk services, the upgraded mobile broadband network will enable richer applications and services such as high-speed video telephony, music on demand, video messaging and large file uploads. The Power Vision NetworkSM is the nation's largest mobile broadband network and is expected to be completely upgraded by 3Q 2007.