Nextel is looking for folks to trial a network in Raleigh-Durham/Chapel Hill: The company has built a trial network there using gear from Flarion, which employs its own Flash-OFDM technology. Flarion is part of the 802.20 standards effort, not to be confused with the 802.16 and WiMax initiatives. Flarion's gear was designed from the start to be an efficient, mobile, broadband network that isn't hampered by legacy cellular gear.
Nextel presumably is using MMDS frequencies that it bought from Worldcom. This network would be competitive with Verizon’s EV-DO network, delivering 1.5 Mbps and as much as 3 Mbps on the downlink. One issue, however, is that once again Nextel would be choosing a technology that hasn’t been widely accepted across the industry, meaning that equipment costs would likely be higher then gear that other operators may deploy. [via Gigaom]