My company purchased 15 phone/radios 7years ago.We are a contractor, wno needed the direct connect portion of the units mainly, and would use the cell phones on a less frequent basis. There was not even an i1000 model yet. The original unit was called the "unicator". In the last 7 years, and as the manager of our equipment and service, I have experienced every possible thing with Nextel. I have had to exchange out defective units, audit billings, deal with coverage issues and worst of all, deal with their "Customer Care".

In my opinion this company has a monopoly on the two way (direct connect) portion of their service. There are no other radios out there to purchase and use for two way communications. Even if a company uses UHF radios, Nextel has purchased these frequencies and so there is no way around using Nextel. If this part of it is not a monopoly, I am not sure what defines one then.

Because of this situation, they have basically no competition for the radio system, they simply do not care about their customers. If any one has ever had any coverage problems and you call customer care, you are on hold forever, then you get someone who is clueless (usually there less than 6 months, and you may even wonder if they have even seen the unit before), and then they make a "trouble ticket", and tell you that they will call you back. In the last 7 years, I have personally called in, at least 500 trouble tickets due to mainly coverage issues, and I have NEVER gotten a call back on one of them. As another epinion stated, they basically have NO customer service. Forget getting issues resolved on your billing in one phone call. It is usually a minimum of 3 months of billings before all the problems are resolved on any given issue on the billing. I have had it take up to 6 months of billings to resolve a problem. They have evolved over time in changing out the phones, when they are defective and this has improved some, but over the course of the last 7 years, I have replaced at least 60 units. This experience has been everything from smooth (very rarely) to my worst nightmare.

There is nothing positive I can say about Nextel. If I could, I would, but there is nothing. As far as I am concerned, there is no worse company and product than this. I consider myself an expert on their phones/radios, their service (if you want to call it that),and their billings. I have dealt with everyone from the newest person in customer care to the president of the local regional office. I have even tried to complain to the CEO of Nextel in order to get some kind of help, because I was having so many problems.

So my epinion covers Nextel as a company, and my recommendation to anyone is to run the opposite way or stick with the regular cell phone by ATT or whoever, but no one should have to be subject to what I have been thru with this company. NO ONE!

As far as the units themselves, we have used everything from the original model to the most current and all are bad for the above reasons. Nice concept, but bad company!



Recommended: No

Amount Paid (US$): 1000 originally to $150 for current style