The iDen network has never been that great for handling data, before the merger, during, or since. 
I'm so sick of (presumably ex or current Nextel employees) insisting Sprint sabotaged the iDen network.  It was never that great to begin with.  There was certainly some amount of time in which it was neglected, during which time Sprint was trying to get rid of it, but alas, no decent takers.  Not even the former CEO of Nextel Tim Donahue.
Sprint has invested an exhorbant amount of resources and infrastructure to improve the iDen network.  The Nextel iDen network is the overwhelming percentage of defactors in subscribers, not CDMA.
Boost, however, is coming along nicely, same iDen network, marketed appropriately, and with some more extra effort, will be just fine in meeting customer expectations.  But Boost targets young adults, massive texters, not the working class which relied on DC chirp.  So yeah, massive texting saturates the network more so than back and forth chirping.
And here, here, to the folks pointing out that Sprint Nextel is literally supporting two different and completely seperate networks.  iDen does not = CDMA, ever.

At the end of the day - this is going to be fixed!!  I wish more companies subscribed to lower the cost and increase the volume models - they can be very profitable!!  With that all being said you can't do a "re-do" on first impressions and it's unfortunate the network got caught by suprise but I'm confident they will get this rectified and as long as they did the math right and don't completely count on breakage they should make some could $$$....Best of Luck!!

MB

part of the problem is that Sprint in all their wisdom layed off a majority of the technical teams that actually managed and knew the Nextel network that carries boost, more specifically the iDEN transport backbone

Re: FutureUser

You are incorrect, Boost Mobile uses the Nextel network just as the article says it does.  As far as I know the Boost phones don't use both CDMA and iDEN frequencies either.

If you are getting a barrage of text messages that were sent hours (or even days) ago all at once, this would be indicative of someone (or maybe some automated server process that restarts the email service during the wee morning hours) fixing the server.  Another possibility is a problem with the network connectivity at the server, but in that case I would suspect you wouldn't be able to send a text message either.  If it simply takes hours for a message to get delivered during peak phone use times, when network activity should be at its highest, then I might consider the network is saturated.  But I still would suspect their email servers are the actual bottleneck.  In any case, I don't see how it is possible for the whole Nextel network to be fixed in a week if it was truly saturated… And the mass customer exodus from Sprint, especially by Nextel users surely leaves a bit of extra bandwith to play with.

There's still a little matter of overhead.  On a CDMA network (surely the texts are going over Sprint's regular network, not the older Nextel technology), there is the matter of obtaining access & paging channels for each "call".  In the case of text messages, that's millions more "calls".  Not a quick fix, either.  The server bottleneck fix will only expose the next weak link in the call chain.  Too bad.

Text messages are emails.  The address is your phone number @ your cell phone providers domain.  What happens when you add thousands of users to an email server?  It gets bogged down, services crash, and emails sit in a queue waiting to be delivered.  How do you fix it?  You add more email servers and do some load balancing.  This has nothing to do with network capacity, and explains why the system can be fixed so quickly.

I use my Nextel cell phone daily, although I don't text. I've not had any problems with calls, however, and had no idea there were any issues. Great to hear that there's still some life in the Nextel network.