[sperry]

Basically what Nick's saying is that we'll need "dual-mode" phones if we want to use both the NEXTEL iDen and the Sprint CDMA towers to increase our coverage.

That's what Verizon did when they bought out a bunch of the smaller providers... in fact they had tri-mode phones, 2 digital modes and one analog, so they could claim they had "the most coverage in America".

So, perhaps we'll see some phones that will operate on both networks in the future, but my guess is we'll more likely see a slow migration of iDen antennas added to Sprint's towers, and vise versa. Unless both Sprint and NEXTEL decide to upgrade to a newer standard at the same time.