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New Specification from Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia and Siemens Mobile Provides Seamless Push to Talk Experience for Consumers and Business Users around the Globe

Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia and Siemens mobile announced today the completion of a jointly developed Push to talk over Cellular (PoC) specification based on the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) as defined by 3GPP. This specification is intended to reduce marketplace fragmentation and provide end users with an easy-to-use push to talk experience wherever they may travel in the world. It was completed to meet a tremendous market interest in push to talk and IMS.

The PoC specification leverages existing 3GPP, OMA, and IETF specifications making the service easy to integrate in operators' existing access and packet core network infrastructures. The PoC specification is a bundle of six specifications including: Requirements, Architecture, Signaling Flows, Group/List Management, and two User-plane specifications (Transport and GPRS).

Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia and Siemens Mobile formed this PoC "technology co-operation" to produce a joint, fast track technology proposal to provide mobile operators with the assurance of easy integration, global interoperability and a competitive handset environment in the mobile communications market. The companies have submitted this specification to the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) standards body for review as a baseline to provide an access-independent and globally interoperable standard for PoC.

Additionally, the PoC Specification has gained support from other industry leaders such as AT&T Wireless Services, Cingular, Sonim Technologies, and Sony Ericsson.

"End-users want to be able to use any enabled handset on any available network without having to worry about if they work together. This is true for all mobile services and push to talk will be no different," said Torbjrn Nilsson, Senior Vice President, Marketing and Strategic Business Development at Ericsson. "The access independent, interoperable, global industry specification that the major vendors now have agreed on is an important step towards ensuring that the end-users will get this."