14 DAY TRIAL // According to a recent study made on the North American mobile market, Push to Talk (PTT), the mobile phone feature meant to allow users to connect almost instantaneously with peers, is expected to account for 8.5 percent of the market by the end of the year 2013. On the other hand, the forecast does not apply to other geographies, but to the North American market only.
Mark Beccue, a senior analyst with ABI Research, says that the business model is the one that influences most of the market share of the feature. “Operators that have tried Push to Talk outside the US have missed the essential point,” he says. “PTT is a business application. Used in vertical businesses, PTT makes sense: its one-to-many functionality can be very useful. Its best-known exponent, Nextel (now Sprint-Nextel) proved that with its subscriber numbers. But strangely, in other world regions MNOs have failed to market PTT successfully to business users or have opted to market to consumers, and it just hasn’t taken off.”
So as to make users turn more to PTT, a next-generation feature emerged, PTX, which has been developed on the basis of PTT, only extended with the inclusion of multimedia content. According to Beccue, “Nobody has proven the use-case for that, any more than for consumer PTT.”
For what it's worth, there are a few things that operators can do so as to unlock the PTT market. Carriers could either steer away from PTT-specific handsets or migrate to an open model, yet this move could prove risky. The currently available PTT services are proprietary, and only users in the same network or owning particular handsets can benefit from them. The limitation could be outpaced if operators enabled cross-carrier interoperability through downloadable and clientless applications.
There are already some vendors moving in this direction, like Push to Talk Ltd in UK, which offers a downloadable client software. Users are enabled to do cross-network PTT for a monthly fee. Kodiak Networks also offers similar PTT applications that do not necessarily imply that users should have PTT-capable handsets.