Nextel is a winner!
Written: Oct 18 '99
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Pros: unique features, great digital coverage, solid responsive service
Cons: high cost, poor customer service, no analog roaming
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| rbeer's Full Review: Nextel Mobile Phone Service in San Francisco/San J... |
What exactly is Nextel?!
Nextel might be one of the most misunderstood and unappreciated cellular providers in the United States. I have found that many people make "external comparisons" of Nextel and other digital cellular or PCS providers and feel that Nextel's costs are unusually high or
that Nextel's only strength is its two-way radio features. Many of these comparisons or judgements appear to be made without first-hand experience of Nextel's service.
I currently subscribe to Nextel and SprintPCS and have used other cellular providers in the past ten years and in this review I will objectively describe Nextel's service and coverage in the San Francisco bay area and compare it with SprintPCS.
I decided to try Nextel after having less than satisfactory experiences with SprintPCS in the Bay Area. I rely on my cellular phone for business and require a cellular provider that offers superior digital coverage and robust service. After nearly a year with SprintPCS, I found that the digital coverage was just acceptable and grew tired of various system anomalies such as inbound calls going directly to voice mail w/o the phone ringing, echoing and other numerous digital artifacts on phone calls, and LONG delays receiving text messages and voice mail notifications. Overall, SprintPCS is a great value but it does NOT provide a robust service and in my opinion is NOT a provider that anyone should rely on in any context at this time.
I am currently active on Nextel's "National Business 600 Plan". This plan offers the following features:
* 600 included "any time" air minutes
* additional minutes charged at .25 cents a minute
* usage is billed at second intervals after one minute of talk time
* free long distance
* Nationwide coverage and no roaming
* unlimited Direct Connect (2 way radio functionality)
* unlimited numeric pages
* 3-way calling
Additionally, I have the following premium services active:
* voice mail, caller-id, and 100 (140 character) text messages ($6.00/month)
Activating the Nextel account was a hassle. You will probably not receive "instant gratification" if you subscribe to Nextel.
1) I had several pre-sales technical questions on service, so I decided to call Nextel's published 800# for assistance. Basically, when you call this number, an operator will refuse to answer any of your questions and will simply take your name and telephone number for a regional sales agent to contact you. If you're lucky, you'll receive a call within a few hours. Instead of going through this system, I recommend going to Nextel's web site to locate a local retailer and dealing with them directly.
2) For whatever reason, Nextel is currently unable to provide instant account activation. Expect to wait 12-24+ hours before your phone is active and ready to be used. I subscribed over the phone on a Friday morning and my phone was not ready to go until Saturday morning. The same types of delays have occurred to other users that I've spoken with.
After my phone was activated, I had to go through a separate step to have my voice mail, caller id, and text messaging activated. This is usually not typical but since my retailer failed to do this for me, I had to have it activated myself. Unfortunately, for two days after I activated my account, Nextel's customer support computer systems were offline and I was unable to have these services activated until they were available. Once their systems were online, the first customer support operator I worked with did not set up my account properly, so I
had one more frustrating delay and had to call again to have the situation resolved.
*** In my opinion, Nextel FAILS for telephone based customer support and new customer activation. There is no excuse for the delay or what I went through to get my phone and features activated - the system and features should be nearly instantly usable. Ideally, it would be nice if I could activate phone features from their web page or from a automated dial-in system.
Regardless of the poor customer support, for me Nextel wins big in the areas of digital coverage, system responsiveness and overall "robust" quality.
1) In my experience, Digital coverage in the south bay is exceptional. I've heard that there is only one major coverage hole in SJ's Almaden area, but have not experienced this directly. I've
traveled all over the Bay Area and am rarely out of coverage area. Unfortunately, I am a big enough geek to A/B compare coverage on SprintPCS and Nextel frequently. One strong point that I'd like to mention in particular is that compared to the 1900mhz SprintPCS signal,
the 800-900mhz Nextel signal is typically much stronger indoors.
2) The system is *FAST*. Inbound voice mail notifications and inbound numeric or text messages are basically instantaneous. I have never had a delay in receiving any form of inbound alert. This is important to me.
I've performed some A/B experiments dialing my SprintPCS and Nextel phone #s from an outside line. In every case, the Nextel phone will ring immediately, but the SprintPCS phone will not ring for usually 5-10 seconds after the number has been dialed.
Another interesting aspect that I've noticed is that when you dial your Nextel phone number from an external line, you can press the "End" button to transfer the call to voice mail. When you push this button, the call is immediately handed over to voice mail w/o a delay. The
type of interactions and communication between the phone and the cell site seem to be very sophisticated and fast compared with SprintPCS.
3) Voice quality is good. I rate it higher than SprintPCS as voices sound warmer and more "analog" without annoying echos or other noticeable digital artifacts. [Of course, the perceived "warmth" could be due to the speaker design on the phone.]
4) You can configure various call forwarding options on the phone similar to a GSM based carrier such as PacBell. These types of features are absent on SprintPCS.
One aspect of Nextel service that I really like is they remain in contact with their customers. I've received a post-activation call from an employee asking about my service. I've also received a newsletter from Nextel explaining weak coverage areas and what they
have done (and are doing) to improve their network. In areas where I've received a poor signal, I've written E-Mail to them and have always received a rapid response.
Other Nextel features that I appreciate are:
1) Direct Connect.
Direct Connect is the ability to contact another Nextel user in real-time such that the phone actually functions like a two-way radio. You can also "broadcast" to groups of users in a fleet. As you can imagine, this is an extremely powerful feature for businesses and families.
Until recently, Nextel has offered this type of two-way contact to members within a fleet (multiple phones on one bill) but this has changed. Nextel now allows you to use the Direct Connection function to other Nextel customers and businesses in your region.
Today, I received a small yellow/white pages from Nextel with listings of businesses that have Direct Connect functions. What a neat idea and a fantastic feature!
2) Minibrowser on i1000+ and i500+ phones
SprintPCS currently offers minibrowser functions that allow you to access certain HDML web sites from your phone! Nextel is offering the same service in 1Q 2000 and it is expected that many Microsoft MSN features will be available through Nextel.
3) Speakerphone on Nextel phones
Because of Direct Connect, most or all Nextel phones have a speakerphone onboard. You can use the speakerphone for regular phone calls, and this is a tremendous feature to be able to use your phone hands-free. The speakerphone works very well in most environments.
4) i1000+ phone
The i1000+ phone (in my opinion) is one of the finest cellular phones available. The user interface does not have the overall "sexy" or intuitive feel as a modern Nokia phone, but the overall "quality" and aesthetics of the phone is outstanding. It has a very solid feel and
is quite configurable.
In my opinion, unless you have a requirement for another Nextel phone, definitely go with the i1000+ (at this time.) I do not recommend the standard i1000 model as it lacks some fundamental features that exist in the i1000+ (such as minibrowser, missed call logs and so on.)
Downsides to using Nextel:
1) The monthly prices are relatively high. I am pretty sure that I pay around $100/month in service charges for the National Business 600 plan with the voice mail, caller id, and text messaging features.
2) Lack of analog roaming. This is an extremely important factor for you to consider before making a cellular choice. Nextel does NOT offer analog roaming. This means that if you're outside of their digital coverage area, you will not be able to use your phone. If you're in a rural area without Nextel coverage and have an emergency, you will not be able to rely on your phone for help. This was a big blocking point for me initially but I have found that in actual use, their digital coverage is extremely strong and they have been no instances where I've needed
to use the phone when outside of their coverage area.
Frankly, the only time I've been without a Nextel signal for any significant length of time was when I visited Yosemite. The rural areas outside of Yosemite have no Nextel signal. FWIW, Pacbell and SprintPCS also did not have digital coverage in this area. (I *DID* have a signal in Fish Camp, CA, about 2 miles south of Yosemite's south entrance, but calls would be dropped consistently about 10 seconds into the call. FWIW, there is not advertised coverage here.)
3) "System Busy" messages. About 5 or 6 times since I've owned the phone, I've received various "System busy" messages when making outgoing calls which appear to be a symptom of a Nextel cell site that is temporarily out of capacity. This has only occurred to me in the
area of DeAnza and Stevens Creek in Cupertino. The solution to this message is simply redialing the number until the message vanishes, but this is very annoying. Contact Nextel when you experience this -- they seem to be genuinely interested in knowing when/where these
occur.
4) Dropped calls. I've had dropped calls using my Nextel service. It seems to occur with about the same frequency as SprintPCS.
5) Unknown security aspects of the iDEN air interface. This is probably not a large issue but it is something that crosses my mind when I discuss confidential material on the phone. Nextel basically leveraged the 800-900mhz ESMR bands for its cellular phones and uses a TDMA based air interface called iDEN. iDEN is somewhat similar to GSM in many ways but one exception is a lack of encryption.
Without going into TDMA and the various modulation and compression methods utilized by Motorola's designers when implementing iDEN, it is theoretically possible to intercept a Nextel phone call.
In my opinion, the bottom line is that calls on CDMA (SprintPCS, GTE) and GSM (PacBell) are almost certainly more secure than iDEN. I don't yet know if this really makes a difference, though.
6) Their web site is very feature poor. SprintPCS allows you to view usage and even perform basic account management online and there is no excuse that Nextel does not offer similar features. Get with it, Nextel!
Overall, despite its flaws, I feel that Nextel offers a very competitive service. It's definitely geared towards business customers. The prices are a bit higher than most other cellular providers, but they offer unique features and a robust product.
Keep in mind that they do not require you to sign contracts, they do not round calls by the minute (I've experienced significant savings because of this!) and they offer a 30 day money back trial period.
PacBell, GTE, Cellular One all require you to sign a service contract. You have a lot of flexibility and leverage with the Nextel service, one example is the ability to change plans if your usage decreases without being restricted or having to pay penalties.
If you're unhappy with your current cell provider, or if you require a robust service, I definitely recommend trying Nextel for the 30 day period.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 200 + $100/month
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Epinions.com ID:
rbeer
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Location: Santa Clara, CA
Reviews written: 2
Trusted by: 6 members
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