Nextel Wants You To PTT Around The Globe

Whatever happened to the great Push-To-Talk wars we were promised last year? All the carriers were looking into offering their own PTT solutions that would blast Nextel out of the water - and Nextel, in response, was working feverishly to improve their offerings. And then, after a few mean spirited commercials blasting the competition, the whole thing disappeared into nothing as carriers suddenly realized (oh no!) that number portability probably required some of their attention. Now that number portability is finally settling down, should we expect a return of the PTT wars? Not necessarily. Carriers may be realizing that, while useful in some cases, PTT alone was not the only reason for Nextel's enviously high ARPUs (average revenue per user). Still, Nextel is continuing their efforts to keep ahead of the competition - just in case - and have now introduced international PTT so that their annoying Direct Connect beep can be heard across the US, Brazil, Argentina, Peru and Canada. Derek adds: Hmmm. And could it be that the non-Nextel carriers are having a scalability problem with their PTT solutions, where as they add customers, the PTT latency increases and over-consumes network resources? We all got suckered here. This was another case of "something coming" that was going to kill an existing, working product. In reality, the "something coming" always comes late, and needs to work out bugs and hiccups.

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