Sprint Nextel announced agreements with QUALCOMM and Lucent Technologies to extend its push-to-talk services.

Sprint Nextel will use QUALCOMM’s QChat solution to provide high performance push-to-talk services to its customers. Sprint currently offers the Nextel Walkie-Talkie push-to-talk service to its customers on the Nextel National Network. The company expects to utilize QChat technology to extend high performance push-to-talk services to customers on the Nationwide Sprint PCS Network, as well as provide interoperable push-to-talk services between users on both networks.

Sprint has selected Lucent Technologies to develop software and infrastructure necessary to enable the new services to work throughout Sprint’s CDMA2000 1xEV-DO Revision A network. In addition, Lucent Services is providing program management, end-to-end multi-vendor network integration, testing, operational readiness and deployment services to implement QChat.

Developed by QUALCOMM, QChat is a next-generation push-to-talk solution designed to deliver advanced walkie-talkie services optimized for CDMA2000 1xEV-DO Revision A wireless networks, as well as interoperability with the Nextel National Network. Featuring a call set-up latency of less than one second between handsets, QChat is expected to offer exceptional call set-up performance and bandwidth savings in comparison to other walkie-talkie approaches.

Sprint expects to begin offering high performance push-to-talk services using QChat in early 2008. Sprint, Lucent and QUALCOMM recently completed successful trials using pre-production handsets, commercial-grade lab systems and EV-DO Revision A field sites.

Commercial availability of the high performance push-to-talk service will follow Sprint’s upgrade of its Power Vision Network to the faster EV-DO Revision A technology being rolled out later this year. In addition to enabling high-performance push-to-talk services, the upgraded mobile broadband network will enable richer applications and services such as high-speed video telephony, music on demand, video messaging and large file uploads. The Power Vision NetworkSM is expected to be completely upgraded by 3Q 2007.