Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Fastmobile Conducts Around The World "Direct Connect"

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2003 19:55:54 -0500

Fastmobile Conducts Around The World "Direct Connect"
World' Push-to-Talk Conversation
Monday February 17, 2:33 pm ET

SCHAUMBURG, Ill. and KENT, England, Feb. 17 /PRNewswire/ -- Leading mobile
communications company fastmobile today 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 will be
repeating its global push-to-talk demonstrations on its stand at the 3GSM World
Congress, Cannes, France (February 17th-21st).

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."

Today's announcement follows a series of successful trials of fastchat, which included
transatlantic "walkie-talkie" calls involving different handsets on different mobile
networks. During the trials, group voice and text instant messages were sent
simultaneously between participants. 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.

fastmobile's European managing director, James Tagg, believes push-to-talk comes at
a fortuitous time for the network operators. "fastchat is a new type of communication
mode sitting in between a voice call and a text message. fastchat will enable people to
have walkie-talkie style communications that are quicker to initiate than dialing the
phone and where they pay only for the seconds they're speaking. This should stimulate
voice and text ARPU and lead to new communications," he said.

fastchat is the second of what will become a suite of 'fast' services to be announced.
The first, fastxt, a mobile instant messaging application, was launched to UK customers
in November 2002.

About fastmobile:

fastmobile has operations in the US, Europe and Asia delivering value added
messaging services over GPRS and other 2.5G and 3G mobile networks. fastmobile's
first service, fastxt(TM), brings the power of instant messaging to mobile phones and
will be followed with a range of innovative services that link the power of the internet
to
the immediacy of mobile.

The company is backed by private investment and venture capital from US companies
Leo Capital Holdings, BlueStar Ventures and Red Barn Investments. The company
raised $4 million in its first round of funding. For more information, please visit
fastmobile's Web Site at http://www.fastmobile.com .

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/030217/cgm032_1.html
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