One million push to talk customers in Europe in twelve months

After months of rumours and speculation that major European operators were conducting PTT trials, Orange has finally announced plans to commercially launch the first PTT offering over GSM in the UK and France in Q2 2004 and across eight other markets by the end of 2004. The tide is definitely turnimg in favour of PTT so far as its prospects in Europe are concerned. Branded Talk Now, Oranges service is currently being trialled by selected business users, with technology provided by Kodiak networks using the Treo 600 handset. EMC expects further handsets based on Symbian and Microsoft operating systems are expected to be added to the portfolio later in Q2 2004. Todays PTT market is limited and confined primarily to iDEN and CDMA networks but already has over 12 million subscribers. Howeverin 2003 Nokia, Siemens and Ericsson launched a joint initiative to define specifications to create an open standard for PTT over Cellular (PoC), thus extending the capability to GSM/ EDGE. GSM subscribers accounted for 71 % of global mobile subscribers at the end of September 2003.