The fad among cellular carriers to provide push-to-talk service is silly


I don't think that carriers' adding push-to-talk service will get them any money

Have you ever looked at your cell phone and said, "I wish this worked more like one of those walkie-talkies I used as a child"?

I doubt you have. I never have. So why the current fad among cellular carriers to offer "push-to-talk" service?

Before I offer an opinion, I should point out that when I first heard some years ago that Japanese carriers were offering camera-phones, I thought that idea was silly. Now I own one. So if I'm right in this case, it will raise my average to 50:50. If I turn out to be wrong, you may want take my future opinions as counter-indicators.

"Push-to-talk" service amounts to voice SMS without the ability to read it later. You dial a number in one way or another and talk into your phone. What you say gets delivered to the recipient's phone and played immediately. There are variations on that arrangement that make it less intrusive and more nearly interactive, but they amount to making it work a lot more like an ordinary cell call. I doubt that the carriers are going to get anywhere by providing two ways of doing the same thing, so I'll concentrate here on the ordinary way it works.

As far as I can tell, the carriers are adding PTT service because Nextel, which has always had the service, has recently been adding subscribers and making money faster than some of its competition. But I'm convinced that emulating Nextel's service isn't going to help the other carriers any.

The reason that people use Nextel's PTT service isn't that they want to, it's that they're made to. And they're made to because it's cheaper. Really, does anyone want their voice to start blaring from someone's belt-pouch with no warning but a beep? And does anyone want to be on the receiving end of such a thing? Of course not. People use the caller-ID features on their phones. Many clamshell-style handsets now have external displays so that people don't even have to open them in order to see who's calling. It's obvious that people prefer to be in control of the calls they take. I've never so much as heard of an individual who signed up for Nextel's PTT service. Those contracts are agreed to by companies who give the handsets to employees who use them as part of their work. I've seen that any number of times. A business that has employees who visit customer sites will often have those employees use Nextel's PTT service. Since they're on duty rather than, for example, in a grocery store it's not a big deal for their cell phones to suddenly start chirping and yacking. And since they all work for the same company, they're guaranteed that most of the people they need to communicate with will have the same service and therefore be reachable that way.

So why would companies sign up for Nextel PTT contracts for their employees? The only plausible reason is that it's cheaper. And a look at Nextel's rate plans suggests that that's right. So it's not surprising that Nextel is adding a bunch of subscribers who want PTT service. Those subscribers are saving money by signing up with them rather than other carriers. So it's not as though the other carriers are going to make a bunch of money if they get those customers to sign up with them.

Nextel may well charge less for PTT service because it costs them less to provide it than it costs any carrier to carry ordinary cellular calls. It's also possible that, in the end, other carriers will also be able to carry PTT traffic for less than it costs them to carry ordinary calls, but that seems like a long-range payoff at best. In the meantime, they're investing money in retrofitting their networks to carry PTT traffic in the hopes of attracting customers who want to pay less money than they currently charge. That may be good for their customers but I doubt that it will make the carriers happy.

Update July 8, 2004
Rupert Godwins isn't impressed with the fad either.

Posted: Mon - December 1, 2003 at 04:16   Main   Category: 

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