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Sprint Launching New Direct Connect on October 2nd, Reminds the Competition Who’s Number one in Push-to-Talk

Posted In News - By Mark Hearn On Thursday, September 22nd, 2011 7:51am PDT With 12 Comments

Back in 2004, Sprint made a bold move and acquired Nextel, whom at the time was the reigning push-to-talk kingpin. The company later rebranded itself and be came what is now known today as Sprint Nextel Corporation. Slowly but surely the Nextel side of things slowly started to “chirp” less and less and pretty much went mute in the mainstream mobile market. Things went so far south, that most individuals now associate Nextel’s once notorious chirp with Boost Mobile’s infamous ”Where You at?” slogan. Oh how the mighty have fallen!

Now if you were thinking that Sprint purchased Nextel just to use their tech for prepaid, you are sadly mistaken. The Now Network has been slaving to reform the way people push-to-talk and will be launching the new Sprint Direct Connect on October 2nd. Check out the snapshot above that gives a side by side breakdown of Sprint’s push-to-talk versus Verizon’s and AT&T’s. Of course we’ll subtract “Sprint Applications” from that list since that reeks of fluff, but needless to say we’ll still take the one on the left.

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About - Mark is the founding father of SprintFeed. He is a nerd's nerd if ever such a thing existed. His love affair with the Now Network started with the release of the Treo 600 back in 2004 and has been going strong ever since. Highly opinionated and somewhat eccentric he shares his ramblings about his network of choice here at SprintFeed.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=654405735 Van Byous

    I’ve used both Sprint CDMA and Nextel iDEN PTT and can vouch that the signal and quality of the Sprint CDMA PTT is worlds better than iDEN. The only thing that keeps most people on Nextel iDEN is the fact that they can swap phones without having to step foot into a Nextel store.

  • Anonymous

    They also seem to like those god awful ugly phones.

  • Ryan

    Do you know for sure that the new direct connect is coming in october 2 or is this a rumor?

  • http://twitter.com/T_BoneBlak667 Daemon Blak

    Is the new iPhone going to “Chirp”, or no? :-)

  • Anonymous

    What does the double asterisk by the ‘Sub-second PTT Call Set Up’ mean? Low latency will be key if they hope to migrate current iDEN subscribers over to this new platform. It needs to be sub-secon, PERIOD, No asterisks…

  • Anonymous

    Give it a few months and, considering how Sprint has been acting recently, those “Yes” rows will change to “No” and the Group PTT will drop down to 10, maybe…

  • Ryan

    Is sprint going to put the new direct connect on boost mobile phones?

  • Noerivas24

    so are they making new boost mobile push to talk phones??
    There are allot of people who use it to call people in Mexico (like me) and i wana know if they are still going to make phones for boost with push to talk

  • Noerivas24

    There sopose to be use for heavy duty work like cunstruction and jobs like that

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1374221392 David C. Holley

    …meanwhile the iPhone5, widely rumored to be available via Sprint, will be announced just 2 days later. Coincidence?

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_MQ4LSM7AMUX4YWUX2UQI5ZXWC4 Michael From Seattle

    Sprint Direct Connect for whom?
    For the unemployed?

  • Russ1944

    Not impressed with the new Kyocera phones with Sprint Direct connect. I’ll keep my old Motorla 502 with Nextel Direct connect. I work for a contractor that just returned 50 Kyocera phones as they couldn’t talk to each other across the building site that was no bigger than a football field. If this is the future for Sprint, you’re going to be in deeper trouble.