Widen

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Widen is a municipality in the district of Bremgarten in the canton of Aargau in Switzerland.

Geography

The village center is situated on a little plateau between the Mutschellen in the south and the Hasenberg in the north, of which the latter is the southernmost part of the Heitersberg. In the west the plateau goes down to the Reuss.

Widen has grown together with some of its neighbour villages Berikon, Rudolfstetten-Friedlisberg and Zufikon. Of the total area (260 hectares) 44 hectares are forest and 98 are built upon. The highest point of the village lies on the Hasenberg at 740 meters, the lowest point at 430 meters near Eggenwil.

Neighbour villages are Bellikon in the north, Bergdietikon in the north-east, Rudolfstetten-Fridlisberg in the east, Berikon in the south-east, Zufikon in the south and Eggenwil in the west.

History

At the end of the 12th century a manor called "Wyda" is mentioned the first time, there's no exact year. "Widen", in the way like it's written today, appears the first time during the 14th century.

In medieval times, the manor belonged to Habsburg. 1415 the Eidgenossen conquered the Aargau and Widen then belonged to the Grafschaft Baden. In March 1798 the French conquered Switzerland and proclamated the Helvetic Republic, in which Widen and Eggenwil formed one single municipality in the short-dated canton of Baden. After the foundation of the canton of Aargau 1803, Widen and Eggenwil were separated. Up to that time, there's not much known about Widen, because there are almost no documents left.

During the 19th century Widen stayed a small village. Lots of poor inhabitants had to leave their home and emigrated. The given up farms were freshly occupied by people from the canton of Bern, which were protestant. That's why today, compared to its merely catholic neighbour villages, Widen has a relatively high percentage of protestant inhabitants.

On the 1 May 1902 the Bremgarten-Dietikon-Bahn was founded and Widen was connected to the railway network, by a station on the Mutschellen pass. During the first half of the 20th century Widen stayed small. However, from 1950 to 1990 the population began to grow very fast, 1990 3915 people lived in Widen. The population then sank slightly and now it stays constantly at about 3600 people.

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WiDEN

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Wideband Integrated Dispatch Enhanced Network, or WiDEN, is a software upgrade developed by Motorola for its iDEN enhanced specialized mobile radio (or ESMR) wireless telephony protocol. WiDEN allows compatible subscriber units to communicate across four 25 kHz channels combined, for up to 100 kbit/s of bandwidth. The protocol is generally considered a 2.5G wireless cellular technology.

WiDEN History

iDEN, the platform which WiDEN upgrades, and the protocol on which it is based, was originally introduced by Motorola in 1993, and launched as a commercial network by Nextel in the United States in September 1996.

WiDEN was originally anticipated to be a major stepping stone for United States wireless telephone provider Nextel Communications and its affiliate, Nextel Partners. However, with the December 2004 announcement of the proposed Sprint Nextel merger, it has been speculated that the Nextel iDEN network will be quickly abandoned in favor of Sprint's CDMA network. Although a complete roadmap of the merger's impact on the combined company's wireless networks has not been released, Nextel and Motorola have agreed to continue to maintain and expand the iDEN network through, at least, 31 December 2010. WiDEN has not been active on the NEXTEL National Network since October of 2005 when rebanding efforts in the 800MHz band began in a Sprint effort to utilize those data channels as a way to handle more cellular phone call traffic on the NEXTEL iDEN network. To this date, WiDEN has not been restored.

WiDEN Subscriber Units

The first WiDEN-compatible device to be released was the Motorola iM240 PC card card which allows raw data speeds up to 60 kbit/s. The first WiDEN-compatible telephones are the Motorola i850 and i760, which were released mid-summer 2005. The recent i850/i760 Software Upgrade enables WiDEN on both of these phones. The commercial launch of WiDEN came with the release of the Motorola i870 on 31 October 2005, however, most people never got to experience the WiDEN capability in their handsets. WiDEN is also offered in the i930/i920 Smartphone, however, Sprint shipped these units with WiDEN service disabled. Many in the cellular forum communities have found ways using Motorola's own RSS software to activate it. WiDEN was available in most places on Nextel's National Network. As stated above, it no longer is enabled on the Sprint-controlled towers. Since the Sprint Nextel merger the company determined that because Sprint's CDMA network was already 3G and going to EVDO (broadband speeds) and then EVDO Rev A (T-1 speeds) it would be redundant to keep upgrading the iDEN data network. WiDEN is considered a 2.5G technology.

Countries operating iDEN networks

Capitalization and Pronunciation

Motorola originally referred to the platform as wiDEN, choosing to capitalize only the letters representing "Dispatch Enhanced Network," as it had with iDEN. However, subsequent promotion from Motorola and Nextel has indicated that the preferred capitalization is WiDEN.

The term has been pronounced, commonly, as a close combination to the words "why" and "den", or simply as the word "widen". The former is closer to the original pronunciation of iDEN, as "eye" and "den".

See also

• iDEN
• Trunked radio system
• List of device bandwidths

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia © 2001-2006 Wikipedia contributors (Disclaimer)
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Last updated on Thursday February 21, 2008 at 08:37:20 PST (GMT -0800)
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