Question on 5185 service

[tferro]

My company is heading towards using Nokia 5185 refurbed CDMA phones for resale as an emergency phone. We currently have a custom made analog phone but are dropping customers like flies due to the ever decreasing analog service througout the U.S. I read a posting on another forum today that says that the older Nokias will not be able to be used on the newer converted 1xRTT networks because they use Nokia rather than QCOM chipsets, and the Nokia chipsets on these handsets are not compatible with 1xRTT networks. Can anyone confirm this and tell me if we should scrap the plan to use these older Nokias? We currently use Alltel as our service provider. Any info would be much appreciated. I've been working with analog only for 10 years and am very much a newbie to digital.

[mwireless]

Analog phones have been out of date for about 8 years now. They get horrible reception and the tie up the system (meaning less people can make calls at the same time). Alltel has also adopted the government regulation that all new post pay cdma phones sold must be equipped with GPS as of May 2004 so if this is how you market your service, Alltel may give you problems. This is the reason why many of my retail customers have now switched their focus more toward prepay. Hope this is what you were asking.