After losing momentum last year due to interoperability concerns, push to talk over cellular (PoC) is poised for a potential comeback with Tuesday's release of the first final PoC standard from the Open Mobile Alliance.
Two years ago, PoC was touted by numerous vendors as the must-have app of 2005, but despite a number of service launches in a handful of Asian markets, the PoC buzz fizzled out by mid-2005.
'Operators love it and think it's great, but saw that PoC was really limited to certain operators and certain handsets, so no community really evolved around it,' OMA chair Jari Alvinen told the Daily News.
Robin Roberts, Asia-Pacific director of core network solutions for the Networks and Enterprise division of Motorola, one of the mobile industry's strongest proponents of PoC, adds that part of the problem in Asia was a lack of enterprise support and 3G-level bandwidth.
'In the early days, PoC was an enterprise play, but in Asia, mobile is primarily directed at consumers,' Roberts said. 'As for the networks, it became clear to operators that running PoC over GPRS would require too much additional investment, and not enough support was available.'
OMA PoC 1.0 cooperates mainly with two other Enabler Release specifications - OMA XML Document Management Enabler 1.0 (OMA XDM 1.0) and OMA Presence Enabler 1.0. However, the OMA Presence spec is still undergoing testing, which could delay adoption of PoC further, says Roberts, as presence is 'a crucial factor for PoC, especially with consumers.'
That said, OMA Presence is expected to be ready in the next few months. With the finalization of Release 1.0, the question remains whether the industry can re-ignite the initial buzz over push-to-talk services. 'They've done so much to develop PoC, I don't think they will stop now,' Alvinen said. Roberts says Motorola will have clients and server products for PoC available by the end of the year.
There is also the question of whether operators will wait for commercial availability of IMS technology, which is designed to support IP-based media services like PoC, as well as presence. Alvinen notes that PoC 1.0 is designed to work with both IMS and non-IMS networks.
Roberts says IMS is more likely to drive demand for PoC. 'That'll encourage operators to take a second look. PoC on its own may not be so compelling, but PoC combined with presence and instant messaging is.'