Two of the world’s top five handset makers said they will flood the wireless market with push-to-talk mobile phones, a move that could turn PTT into a worldwide wireless necessity-much like voicemail and text messaging-in just a few short years.
Siemens last week announced that most of its “middle-class model” mobile phones will feature PTT technology by 2005, news that comes on the heels of Nokia Corp.’s promise that all of its GPRS/W-CDMA handsets would feature the technology by 2005 as well. Nokia is the world’s largest handset provider, and Siemens claims the No. 4 slot. The companies are also selling associated carrier software and infrastructure for the service.
Nokia and Siemens are both backing the push-to-talk-over-cellular (PoC) specification, which was just released in September. L.M. Ericsson and Motorola Inc. also signed on to support the standard. The specification involves software upgrades for both phones and networks, and is based on the Internet Protocol Multimedia Sub-system protocol for CDMA and GSM networks.
“PoC is a topic of global interest that will be a big hit in 2004,” said Lothar Pauly, a Siemens Mobile board member. “We’re putting great effort into driving the market, backed by our wealth of expertise from mobile phones, middleware and applications right up to the infrastructure. We’ll be the first equipper to present customers with a complete end-to-end offering in the area of PoC that’s already based on the open, cross-vendor specification. We don’t want any proprietary solutions.”
Both Nokia and Siemens are promising PTT carrier deployments next year. Indeed, Siemens said more than 10 mobile operators in the United States, Europe and Asia will test PTT technology during the first half of next year, and that the industry will see commercial introductions by the middle of next year.
Nokia and Siemens “see it as an easy sale,” said Albert Lin, telecommunications analyst for American Technology Research.
By pledging that their new phones will include PTT technology, Nokia and Siemens are pushing their carrier customers into launching the service, Lin said. However, due to the relatively low infrastructure costs associated with the PoC specification, and the potential of a significant return on that investment, Lin said most carriers will be easily persuaded to offer PTT services.
“I think that’s exactly Nokia and Siemens’ view of the world,” he said.
Further, both companies are likely to heavily promote their own PoC infrastructure products ahead of their PTT phones, thus working to corner the market. Some believe Nokia and Ericsson used the same strategy to corner the market for multimedia messaging infrastructure by offering the associated MMS handsets.
“It will be interesting to see how PTT gets implemented,” Lin said.
Although Nextel Communications Inc. and Motorola have long ruled over the push-to-talk market, it appears the rest of the world will rapidly join them. Lin said carriers could score between $10 and $20 per customer in additional revenues thanks to walkie-talkie services, making PTT potentially far more lucrative than picture messaging and other data services.
“Why wouldn’t they also offer (PTT) service?” Lin asked.
Nokia and Siemens appear to have taken the lead in the push-to-talk market. No. 3 handset maker Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. said it didn’t have a specific PTT roadmap but that it would install the technology upon carrier requests. Samsung said it will offer a PTT handset in the United States in January. Motorola did not respond to questions about its PTT roadmap. Lin said Motorola, which has so far dominated the PTT market, might fall behind other PTT handset manufacturers as it has done with camera phones.
“I think most of (the other handset makers) will take a wait-and-see approach” in offering PTT handsets, Lin said.
