Our own Wataniya Telecom is joing up with some other companies to form Bravo in Saudi Arabia as a mobile telecom provider. Yet they are not going to provide GSM service, viagra 40mg but Motorola’s iDen system. The iDen system is the stuff that Nextel uses for their network, drugs so this new company will most likely be providing services to the business in that region, order especially the trucks that pass through the country.
This is a good investment for Wataniya since Saudi Arabia is the main transport section of the Gulf, everything passes through Saudi and I know that keeping track of trucks where abouts is a pain in the ass. So if it is implemented strongly in Saudi then it will eventually move to the other countries in the region so that they can all share the same network when moving around.
I believe once the coverage map for this network reaches Kuwait, it won’t be too long before Wataniya will start to offer this service in Kuwait.
. iDEN launched in Saudi Arabia
As far as I can tell, the only advantage to iden is the direct connect/push to talk feature. Other than that in the US it means you generally have a smaller coverage area since you cant roam on GSM providers, in addition try finding iden phones with bluetooth.
Actually Nextel shares many of GSMs features .. there is a gsm phone that runs on the nextel network. As for the PTT feature, I believe that it can be adapted to work with the GSM network.
The new version of GSM supports PTT, but as I understand it is limited to just 5 people at one time and of course depending if you network provides it.
Nextel is the work horse of American business, if they integrate GPS into those phones then they will be the work force for trucking companies and other business. Easy way to communicate and track your employee.
I think, iDEN system have to mobilize with new generations of the GSM systems, 3G, Edge, and CDMA, from the handsets and other system components, relating to my work in the filed the iDEN components still huge as physical dimensions, and need to be re-designed to go with the GSM components from the dimensions, speed and capacity,
Adeeb, I think the best thing for iDen is to move away from being proprietary and more open. It will allow for more service providers and bigger array of phone choices.
I believe that the iDEN offer contemporary solutions for the growing business sector needs, as well as other sectors requiring instantaneous, real time communication, and the benefits of time and cost saving, efficiency and productivity.
There goes another dumb saudi buying a network which is useless presumabley because of some sort of kick back. This reminds me of the Jeddah airport fiasco 25 years ago. Why would anyone want to pay money to go back to the past when they really should be thinking of going into the future. If they really wanted to implement another network, they should of went the CDMA route, atleast then they could upgrade to EVDO. Even that, IMHO, is a bad idea. All in all, iDen is slowly going away, even nextel knows it. If it was because of PTT, then they could have easily implemented PTT on GSM. Very few carriers around the world use iDen so forget about roaming. The only other feature thats good about iDen is that most phones come integrated with AGPS however if you look at all the new UMTS phones, many of them come with that feature built in. It would have been cheaper to upgrade GSM to UMTS(Same backend) rather then implement a whole new network. Anyways, thats just my two cents worth.
iDEN PTT is a viable and useful service and it has a place in the Saudi Market. The Saudi system was put in place by good people.