Actually your moms recpetion troubles have nothing to do with the merger. Sprint and Nextel have simply merged for financial gain. The merger has no effect on the recpetion because Spint's network is a CDMA network opposed to Nextel's IDEN network. Srints CDMA network would not interfere with your mom's recpetion.

I suggest she migrates over to sprint and gets a plan with sprint. I was with nextel for 4 years and when i heard of the merger and how you can migrate between the two networks without having to pay cancelation fee's i almost dropped to my knees in praise! Sprints CDMA network is much better if you use voice communication opposed to Push To Talk(like i did, all of my friends dropped nextel so i had no use for PTT).

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the merger has nothing to do with reception mainly becuase the technology that each carrier uses is different so there wouldnt be any problems. with nextel there could be problems becuase they are going through the re-banding situation that was reached with the FCC and others.

if the reception is better on sprint than nextel then yes, if not then no.