Sprint Nextel Teams With QUALCOMM and Lucent Technologies to Extend Industry-Leading Push-To-Talk Services with QUALCOMM’S QChat Solution

Sprint Nextel Teams With QUALCOMM and Lucent Technologies to Extend Industry-Leading Push-To-Talk Services with QUALCOMM’S QChat Solution

Sprint Nextel (NYSE:S) 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 (NYSE: LU) 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 is committed to providing innovative tools that empower our customers to do what they want, when they want,” said Iyad Tarazi, vice president of network development for Sprint. “The work we are doing with QUALCOMM and Lucent represents a milestone in our strategy of offering all our customers a high performance push-to-talk service that they can set-up and connect in under a second no matter which of our networks they are on.”

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