Keeping itself ahead of a rapidly approaching pack, Nextel Communications Inc. this week is set to launch the first phase of its much-hyped nationwide Direct Connect service, which will allow customers to contact each other across the country with the familiar chirp of the carrier’s push-to-talk service.
For the carrier, which has offered Direct Connect services in local markets for 10 years and began its roaming Direct Connect late last year, the nationwide offering is expected to be one of its most important product launches.
“It’s definitely one of the most significant product launches in the company’s history,” said My-Chau Nguyen, vice president of segment marketing for Nextel.
The carrier said the first phase of the nationwide launch would include markets in the Northeast, including Boston; Southern California, including San Diego, Los Angeles and Las Vegas; and Florida, with additional markets coming online weekly. Nextel said it expects to have the service available nationwide by the end of August. Hawaii is set to be one of the last markets to be launched.
Nextel has also been advertising the service in both TV and print advertisements for months leading up to the launch and expects future marketing efforts touting the service to increase.
To help with ease of use and adoption of the nationwide capability, Nguyen said Nextel customers could continue to use their current wireless handsets and that once they enter a market where the nationwide Direct Connect service is available, the handset would be provisioned automatically.
Nguyen also noted Nextel would provide a number of pricing options for the service, including an unlimited plan for $10 per month, and pay-as-you-go options.
“People understand the nationwide Direct Connect is a premium service and are willing to pay for that functionality,” Nguyen explained. “Customers also want flexible pricing options and we understand those needs.”
While a number of carriers are expected to launch similar nationwide push-to-talk offerings later this year, Nextel is confident they will not compare with its Direct Connect service due to call set-up times slower than Nextel’s claimed sub-one second and Nextel’s history of handling the increased traffic patterns push-to-talk services generate. Nextel claimed recently that more than one-third of its total voice traffic is handled by its Direct Connect service.
“We have built a whole company over the past 10 years that has learned how to support the Direct Connect service and we think that is important to our customer base,” Nguyen said.
Nextel’s nationwide Direct Connect launch comes just weeks after start-up Fastmobile launched its Fastchat push-to-talk service that allows GSM customers worldwide to download an application to any Symbian operating system handset and use an operator’s GPRS network to communicate with other Fastchat users. Fastmobile’s service, which can be purchased directly from the company’s Web site, is reportedly being looked at by a number of GSM carriers in the United States.
Qualcomm Inc. also recently announced it had successfully demonstrated push-to-talk call set-up performance of less than two seconds between dormant mobile phones using its QChat service over CDMA infrastructure. The company said the QChat client is deployed as an application on its BREW platform and offers dynamic, over-the-air upgrades of handset software, management of group membership by subscribers and ad-hoc creation of chat groups.
But following an agreement Qualcomm signed with Nextel and Motorola Inc., which many analysts said Qualcomm needed to sign in order to develop a competitive push-to-talk offering, Qualcomm can only market the QChat service in countries where Nextel does not operate. Qualcomm has signed agreements with two international operators to deploy the service.
Analysts noted that the agreement between Nextel and Qualcomm, along with Nextel’s predicted migration to a CDMA-based network technology, could allow the carrier to eventually link its Direct Connect service with Qualcomm’s international QChat presence to offer a worldwide service.
Nextel Chief Executive Officer Tim Donahue also recently highlighted the company’s desire to expand its network presence when he said the carrier may look to satellites as a way to expand its service overseas including the use of its Direct Connect function.
