Many people customized Nokias, with a new case or ringtones that displayed a persons interest. The customization came to some Nextel users that wanted to personalize their phones.
So with the creation of housings, cases that aren't snapped on but rather put together, began with the Condor Motorola talk for 2-digit series phones i. The Direct Connect system, offered by Nextel since the middle of the s, was especially popular with companies and government agencies involved in natural security thanks to its private, exclusively owned technology that was impossible to illegally access.
Donahue expected its importance to grow well beyond the 10 percent of Nextel customers with high-security needs as of February ; among these customers were the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the U.
Donahue completed nationwide Direct Connect service in , such that a user on the East Coast, for example, would receive the same performance whether talking to someone on the West Coast or down the street. In Donahue planned to introduce new features to Direct Connect, improving voice quality, adding video functions, and setting up Web-based directories for dynamic conference lines.
While Donahue advanced Nextel's established push-to-talk features, the competition still struggled to introduce push-to-talk for the first time.
Donahue was also developing plans to use satellite technology to deploy Direct Connect globally, which was very appealing to the fastest-growing customer sectors of government and public safety. Before Nextel was just another company in the wireless phone business. By that year, with the competition struggling, Nextel's accomplishments over the preceding years became evident. Donahue felt that Nextel had become the leader in the United States with regards to data services in the wireless arena, pointing out that in Nextel, in conjunction with Motorola, was the first wireless company to launch Java-technology-enabled wireless phones in the United States.
Mobile professionals could personalize and improve their phones with the latest business tools and network applications as well as improve the quality of their professional lives. Later in Donahue had launched the Motorola iBoard, which let Nextel customers compose e-mail, organize address books and calendars, and work with Java-enabled applications—all from a wireless phone and a full-sized, foldaway keyboard. In late Donahue directed the successful launch of the handheld, wireless BlackBerry device, created by Research in Motion.
The device offered a suite of Nextel wireless mobile solutions, including all-digital cellular service, e-mail, Direct Connect digital walkie-talkie service, numeric and text messaging, Nextel Online service, and Java technology. By the end of Nextel had one million Java-capable handsets on the market. At this point Donahue saw Nextel's fundamental strength as its ability to initially sell cost-effective walkie-talkies to businesses, later upgrading services to include a wider range of data transmission capabilities.
Though Nextel was ranked fifth among the six national U. Overall, Nextel experienced record-setting financial results, with six straight quarters of positive net income as of the last quarter of Donahue built Nextel into a Fortune company with a significantly reduced debt load and a subscriber base that had more than tripled between and Donahue stayed focused on the business customer, developing products and services that others could not provide or quality that others could not match.
The SMR business had long been dominated by Motorola, which not only manufactured the radio systems, but also operated dozens of networks. O'Brien and McAuley feared that Motorola would oppose their plan to build a new communication network within the SMR frequencies and, with its substantial resources, persuade the FCC to stop them. They expected Fisher to tell them that he would not allow Fleet Call to so radically upset Motorola's SMR business, one of its oldest enterprises.
But to their astonishment, Fisher not only supported the idea, he asked if Motorola could become a partner in the venture. The two companies worked out an equity stake in Fleet Call for Motorola, and developed plans for the electronics giant to build parts of the new system. Throughout the remainder of the decade, it continued to operate them as radio dispatch systems using old analog transmission technology, and provided service to more than , subscribers. The systems would continue to accommodate existing fleet dispatchers but, by going digital, would allow thousands more calls to be placed.
In its opinion, the Fleet Call system would provide a healthy form of competition for entrenched and technologically limited cellular companies, while providing customers with new options only available with digital technology. Simply described, this system made use of periods in which no data was being transmitted such as during pauses in conversation by temporarily lending communication capacity to other calls.
Statistically, all calls would have such pauses more or less evenly distributed. TDMA ensured that every available "channel" was not squandered by transmitting silence. With the radio bands in its possession, and having decided on a technology for the system, Fleet Call brought in other partners to build the network with Motorola. One of them was Northern Telecom, a Canadian manufacturer of telecommunications network equipment. In December the Japanese consumer electronics giant Matsushita joined the project.
Matsushita was the manufacturer of the Panasonic and Technics brands, as well as the company that had bought the Quasar line from Motorola some years earlier. Matsushita agreed to supply subscriber units basically handsets for Fleet Call's digital mobile networks.
The initial offering of 7. Investor interest in Fleet Call increased dramatically when details of the company's plans--and information about its partners--got out. Share prices nearly doubled as investors clamored to get in on the business.
The company completed work on its Los Angeles cell site in May , using a system that operated in the megahertz band. This frequency could accommodate mobile phone service, two-way radio dispatching, alphanumeric paging and messaging, and dozens of other future applications--all clearly beyond the capability of conventional cellular systems. In addition, the combined functionality of the Fleet Call system would allow customers to receive a single bill for paging, cellular, and mobile data services, rather than the three they would receive under the previously existing systems.
The only downside to Fleet Call's system was that it was incompatible with other cellular networks, precluding "hand-offs" to and from other cellular operators outside Fleet Call's service territory. Plans were expanded to provide seamless service throughout California by mid The company also turned its system incompatibility into a marketing advantage by touting its superior privacy and anti-billing fraud characteristics.
Much of Fleet Call's expansion was made possible by its December merger with Dispatch Communications, another mobile radio company with the same plans as Fleet Call. The combined operation gave Fleet Call coverage in nine of the country's ten largest markets, representing a potential user population of In January , the company scored something of a coup when it hired John Caner, director of wireless data development at PacTel Cellular.
In Fleet Call, Caner saw an opportunity to build an entirely new communications system without the burden of aging legacy systems and Bell-related regulatory problems. Two months later, in March , the company changed its name to Nextel Communications. Update: Sprint chief Forsee resigns. Analysts say Sprint 'doesn't stand for anything'. Sprint insists its WiMax network is on track. Update: Three top execs leaving Sprint Nextel.
Peter Sayer covers enterprise applications for CIO.
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