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Sprint and Nextel have announced plans to merge. My response?

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Really, this is going to be VERY amusing at best, and nightmarish for Sprint and Nextel customers at worst. The AT&T Wireless-Cingular merger is already off to a rought start, and the technology used by both networks is the same.

So imagine the dilemna to come: Basically two cell phone companies that run two different networks that are probably as incompatible with each other as you can possibly get (no one has ever made a phone for Nextel that can roam on Sprint, nor vice versa) have decided to turn themselves into a single unified mobile phone network. And they expect to close the deal in less than a year.

Riiight.

Official announcement from both companies appears here. Quite a rosy picture they paint too. We will see if the expectations they put forth can be lived up to.

It’s amazing that these days, when I find it very annoying that it’s hard to get a cell phone signal in places like elevators. Folks in Louisiana, however, have it somewhat rougher:

Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of 1876 never reached Mink, a onetime trappers’ paradise in the Kisatchie National Forest in west-central Louisiana, although neighbors just down the road on Highways 117 and 118 were wired for telephones in the 1970s.

The telephone also never reached the hundred families of Shaw and Black Hawk, hunting and camping communities across the state along the Mississippi River, some of the few and untabulated places around the country lacking telephone lines. Yes, the telephone is not everywhere. In fact, televisions are more common in American homes today.

Quite amazing: in Iraq, there was wrangling over what cell phone standard to use just a few months back. Yet in the US, there are still places where the smoke signal remains the most reliable form of long distance communication.