Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Big three GSM players target iDEN market

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Feb 2003 03:50:36 -0500

This a Big News....

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Big three GSM players target iDEN market

Ericsson, Nokia and Siemens have said that they are jointly defining specifications for an
open standard for direct-call push to talk service over GPRS. The technology will use the
capabilities of the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) as specified by 3GPP for enabling IP
connections between mobile phones. Initial trials are expected to begin in the second half
of 2003.

Push to talk service is a two-way form of communications that allows users to engage in
immediate communication with one or more receivers, similar to Walkie Talkie -- simply by
pushing a button on their handsets. Users receiving the transmission hear the sender's
voice automatically without having to answer the call. Business users like the fleet
management communication between taxi drivers and their dispatcher is one concrete example
of such a use case. Consumers benefit from push to talk service in coordinating
recreational and social activities (for example, families or friends separated in a large
ski resort or amusement park) representing a huge market potential for the services.
Previous implementations of push to talk service in cellular networks have been based on
proprietary technology and on a limited scale.
It is possibly notable that Motorola is missing from the line up - as a GPRS enabled Push
to Talk would be a serious competitor to its own iDEN system which is widely used in the
America's. As the majority of the network operators supporting the move are American, it
can be presumed that this will be rolled out there first, in direct competition to
Nextel's implementation of iDEN.

Meanwhile, fastmobile also announced that it has successfully conducted the first 'around
the world' push-to-talk mobile phone conversation. Staff using standard Nokia 7650 and
3650 handsets running fastmobile's new push-to-talk application, fastchat, to speak to
participants in Chicago, USA, Kent, UK and Henan Province, China, conducted the
"walkie-talkie phone" conversation.

fastmobile plans to launch fastchat in both the United Kingdom and United States in the
second quarter of this year and has plans for a subsequent roll-out of the service
throughout Europe later in 2002.

fastmobile president and CEO Kang Lee, said: "Nearly three-years' development has gone
into creating products that exploit the capabilities of GPRS networks to dramatically
change how people communicate. It could easily generate as fundamental a change to our
communication habits as email, and then SMS, did. Regardless, push-to-talk will certainly
be one of the killer applications for this year, and it's now only weeks away."

The tests used a compact fastchat client application running on standard Nokia 7650 and
3650 handsets with Symbian operating systems. A fastmobile server, untethered to any
particular operator, managed the streaming of the digitized voice and text conversations
across the GPRS data networks of US operator T-Mobile and UK operators Orange and
Vodafone. The service requires no special hardware to be added to either the mobile
handsets or the operators' networks.

Posted to the site on 18-Feb-03

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