Sprint to sell Nextel??

The Third Place cell carrier in the United States, SprintNextel is being rumoured to be considering selling or doing away with the iDen cellular phone/two way radio network it acquired when Sprint bought Nextel in 2005. SprintNextel is currently facing pressure from the Federal Communications Commission to relinquish the wireless sprectrum that the Nextel iDen network uses in order to turn it over to public safety agencies.

Efforts to move users of iDen over to CDMA based walkie talkie services have so far proven fruitless. Corporate users like the instant access that iDen offers, two way radio over CDMA has a seven second delay from pushing the push to talk button until other person hears what is being said.

Pressure is mounting from within Sprint Nextel to control costs, The cell phone porton of the iDen technology is based on TDMA, which means running two parallel networks which costs more. For SprintNextel which has been losing subscribers for the past year, what did they get by buying up Nextel?