Operators
In the United States of America there are two large public iDEN service providers: Sprint Nextel and SouthernLINC Wireless, and several small public and private iDEN service providers. Numerous private systems exist, including one run by ARINC, covering all major airports. Countries which have operating iDEN networks include Canada, Argentina, Peru, Mexico, Brazil, Jordan, Chile, Israel, Philippines, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Japan, El Salvador, China and most recently India and Guatemala. Full Roaming is available between Sprint/Nextel in the US, Telus (Canada), and NII (Mexico and S. American markets) Data/Voice/Radio. For markets not controlled by NII Holdings, Inc., the roaming is for voice telephony only.
Motorola is committed to support of iDEN technology despite the Sprint buyout of Nextel and Sprint/Nextel's supposed eventual conversion to Sprint's CDMA system. Sprint/Nextel has stated they will support iDEN until June 2013 and Sprint has maintained their iDEN holdings with the purchase of the Sprint CDMA affiliate network, iPCS, for $426 million, which Sprint was repeatedly engaged in lawsuits over non-compete agreement violations stemming from the 2005 purchase of Nextel and the later purchase of Nextel Partners. Other iDEN carriers have no foreseeable expiration date for their services. The speed of iDEN's push-to-talk (a.k.a. dispatch) feature remains the fastest in the industry as compared to Sprint Qchat and Verizon PTT in the US.
There is a smaller subset of the iDEN network called "Harmony Wireless Communications System". With Small System Release 7.0, it supports a maximum site count of 160 or 576 individual cells. Harmony has the ability to interface with a full iDEN system, and has the ability to support interconnect, dispatch, and packet data. SSR7.1 is the latest Harmony release.
Read more about this topic: Integrated Digital Enhanced Network