Turkish operator Turkcell has become the latest operator to launch push-to-talk services following the completion of “successful” trials.
For watchers of the development of push-to-talk (PTT), which has attracted operators because of the increased ARPU and decreased churn it has brought to US operators, most notably Nextel, the most interesting aspects of the service launch will be that Turkcell has chosen to address the business market first, and has based the service on PoC technology from Nokia.
PoC (Push-to-talk over Cellular) is the name given to the standard currently being fully defined within the Open Mobile Architecture to be compatible with the IMS as standardised in 3GPP. Although all iterations of PoC from the leading OEMs are necessarily pre-standard the vendors have been selling PTT hard now for over a year.
Nokia says its technology offers a “full feature set and smooth migration” to the upcoming standard, and has more than 30 operator trials ongoing and commercial contracts with 22.
Muzaffer Akpinar, CEO of Turkcell, said that Nokia was the obvious choice given its existing relationship with the operator.
Turkcell had 22.3 million subscribers at the end of September 2004, and has now opened its PTT service to business customers. The adoption of PTT as a mass-market application within any operator will require a large update of the handset base, as well as user education and network side technical capability