Push-to-talk to hit SA soon

By Warwick Ashford for Motorola

Johannesburg, 01 Dec 2005

Walkie-talkie-style mobile phone connections will be introduced to SA early in 2006, according to Motorola`s senior leadership team attending GSM Africa taking place in Cape Town.

"Instant voice messaging is probably a more accurate way of describing what push-to-talk technology offers the consumer market," says Charlie Henderson, EMEA regional director for Motorola push-to-talk over cellular (POC) group.

According to Henderson, POC is exploding into markets all over the world as the technology matures and standards issues are resolved, with entry into the local market being cleared by the recent liberalisation of the telecoms industry.

POC enables instant voice exchanges between subscribers to the service over any packet data (GPRS) network by emulating a half-duplex two-way radio connection on a mobile handset, explains Henderson.

A POC contact list provides information on who is "present" for immediate push-to-talk contact. All users have to do is press one button to talk and release the button to listen.

Local cellular network operators will be able to deploy Motorola`s POC solution over existing infrastructure because it uses an independent server and is implemented on the IP backbone of the core network.

"This is voice over IP for mobile phones and because it uses data channels it will enable existing cellular networks to carry more voice calls, although extra capacity will probably need to be added as demand increases," he says.

Henderson says POC will initially be targeted at the business market in SA because of the natural parallel with walkie-talkie-type communication that enables geographically dispersed workgroups to call an entire pre-defined group as well as individuals.

Consumer market adoption is expected to take off only in 2007 as the technology becomes more widely known and networks acquire the technical ability to introduce billing mechanisms for international roaming POC as well as local and national calls.

Motorola and other manufacturers have a slew of POC-enabled handsets ready for roll-out, but Henderson says networks will also make a downloadable client available for use on other handsets already being used in SA.

Motorola developed its POC technology over a decade ago in the US and has been running the service with American service provider Nextel on an iDen network. Henderson says POC is expanding in Europe, Middle East and Africa with 19 implementations so far.