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Wideband Integrated Dispatch Enhanced Network (WiDEN) was a software enhancement for the iDEN enhanced specialized mobile radio (ESMR) wireless telephony protocol, both developed by Motorola. WiDEN enabled compatible subscriber units to communicate using four combined 25-kHz channels, resulting in up to 100 kbits/s of bandwidth. WiDEN was generally regarded as a 2.5G wireless cellular technology.
Techopedia Explains Wideband Integrated Dispatch Enhanced Network
The protocol that WiDEN was based on and upgraded from was Motorola’s iDEN, which was introduced in 1993 and then later launched in September of 1996 in the United States as a commercial network being run by Nextel Communications. The four 25-kHz channels could support up to 100 kbits/s of bandwidth, but in typical usage users could only get speeds of 60 kbits/s for data connections.
Because of the upgrades it brought, WiDEN was anticipated to become the next step for Nextel Communications as it offered greater flexibility than the CDMA network being run by Sprint, where users had problems surfing the Internet using CDMA-enabled phones. But the Sprint Nextel merger came and CDMA was used in favor of WiDEN, which was eventually decommissioned in October 2005. The original iDEN network was later decommissioned by Sprint on June 30, 2013, and the spectrum used by iDEN was reused for the Sprint LTE network.
