The Hindu Business Line : Push-to-talk: Nokia in touch with telecom operators

PUSH to talk over cellular (POC), the voice service for one-to-one and one to group communications, is likely to be the next big application in the wireless world after SMS, according to Mr Shankar Meembat, Nokia Networks Director, Core solutions.

Mr Meembat feels that as POC enables instant communication, the application has tremendous business potential. Keeping this in view, Nokia was currently discussing with many operators in India for introducing the services.

The Nokia Networks Senior Vice President, Mr Simon Beresford-Wylie, said that the company was forging ahead with push to talk. Nokia's POC solution was being rolled out in networks with a total subscriber base of about 100 million. It had concluded commercial contracts with 13 operators so far and was expecting several POC services to be launched during the next few months.

During the two-day Nokia Connection 2004 in Singapore on June 14 and 15, the company announced its end-to-end solution for SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) based applications. The Nokia IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), the key enabling technology for IP multimedia services, is now available for commercial deployments.

According to Mr Juha Akras, Nokia's Senior Vice President, Core Networks, the IP multimedia communications will become "mainstream, supporting richer, more dynamic person-to-person communications" in future.

He says that Nokia IMS delivers a connectivity mechanism that enables terminals and other SIP capable devices to establish IP sessions between each other. According to Mr Anssi Vanjoki, Executive Vice-President, and Mr Mauro Montanaro, Vice-President - Sales and Channel Management of Nokia Multimedia, like the printing press, radio and television, mobile would be the new medium of communication. They felt that multimedia would be the next growth enabler for vendors as well as operators.

After two years of dampened demand and investments, Mr Wylie said the mobile industry was focusing on bringing value and innovation to mobile users. Nokia alone had announced well over 20 radio access network deals this year, more than three times the number of Nokia contracts in the corresponding period of 2003.