The Hindu : Business : Now mobile phone users can `push to talk'

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, May 28, 2004

Business

Business

Now mobile phone users can `push to talk'

By Anand Parthaasarathy

BANGALORE, MAY 27. In a canny mix of state-of-the-art Internet-based telephony and a speaking mode borrowed from wireless walkie-talkies of the pre-cell phone era, Tata Teleservices today announced the launch of `Push-To-Talk' (PTT) services for its mobile customers in India.

The company behind the Tata Indicom brand of telecom services is thus first-off-the-block in Asia with this technology, that industry watchers rate next only to built-in cameras as most compelling mobile phone feature of the future, for consumers.

Australian provider Telstra has just completed PTT trials in that country, while Malaysia is about to evaluate it. The feature is not generally available, even in high mobile usage nations like Japan and Korea.

Unveiling the service with a PTT call to Ashok Soota, Chairman of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) National Committee for Electronics and Information Technology, Tata Teleservices President, Amit Bose, said it would initially be available as a free trail feature for select corporates in Bangalore, but would be offered to customers in all eight telecom services where it operates over the next two months. By July the company plans a four-city-a-day growth that will extend its footprint from the current 50 towns to around 1,000 by year end.

"PTT has many features for corporate customers — like the ability to speak with a group of subscribers with a single call — but this is ultimately a value added services for the masses,'' he added.

Tata has tied up with the Japan-based hand set maker Kyocera to provide the handsets with the additional PTT feature. They are otherwise full functional Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA)-type phones and are expected to cost between Rs. 5,000 and Rs. 6,000.

Speaking on the sidelines on the launch event, Brian Dunphy, Director, Business Development, with Qualcomm, the San Diego, California (U.S.)-based company that makes the chip that fuels almost all CDMA phones, told The Hindu that Tata was the world's first telecom provider to use its `BrewChat' technology that makes possible PTT's `one to one' and `one to many' communication. While the U.S. provider Nextel was the first to offer PTT it was still in its infancy outside that country — making the Indian operator, one of the pioneers in this arena, he added.

However Tata's Mr. Bose is the first to admit that the exclusive status may be shortlived: he expects most Indian mobile service providers, both CDMA and the rival Global Services Mobile (GSM), to offer the PTT feature by 2005.

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