Mobile Communications - Push-to-Talk Springs Up in India
May 28, 2004
Hutchison Essar, a division of Orange, has begun offering push-to-talk services in India. Kyocera is supplying approximately 300,000 push-to-talk phones, which use the GSM standard. Hutchison Essar has partnered with Fastmobile of the US to develop the service.
Earlier, Tata Teleservices won the distinction of being the first Indian operator to offer push-to-talk. The company will first test the market in the corporate sector through free trials. With handsets also supplied by Kyocera, Tata Teleservices's service uses the CDMA system, and is based on Qualcomm's BREW (Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless) software.
Qualcomm has been particularly aggressive in India of late. The company is establishing a mobile phone chip design center in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, which will also provide technical support to Asian clients. Qualcomm expects to hire 100 engineers in India by the end of 2004. The company will also begin running a support center in Bombay near the end of 2004; the center will provide support to customers throughout the Asia-Pacific region.
A Qualcomm executive has stated that the Indian market is even more important than the Chinese market at the present time. In terms push-to-talk, India is the first Asian country to launch the service. Australia and Malaysia are still in the evaluation phase, while highly developed markets such as Japan and Korea have yet to roll out the service. Meanwhile, other Indian operators such as Bharti Tele-Ventures and Reliance Infocomm are looking into offering push-to-talk.