The battle over business customers continues to heat up as Nextel Communications Inc. and Verizon Wireless launched new advertising campaigns targeting potential deficiencies in each other’s business-centric offerings.
Nextel’s campaign, which includes full-page advertisements in prominent newspapers, highlights latency issues with Verizon Wireless’ recently launched push-to-talk service asking in bold type “What part of ‘instant’ don’t the other guys understand?” The ads go on to tout Nextel’s Direct Connect services’ sub-one-second latency as well as its more than 11 years of experience in offering push to talk and more than 12 million customer base using push-to-talk-enabled handsets.
While Nextel is working latency issues, Verizon Wireless’ advertising pushes the carrier’s network coverage, claiming its service is available in a larger geographic area than Nextel’s service with its “Now there’s a push to talk that works where you do” claim.
Sprint PCS initiated a similar business battle with AT&T Wireless Services Inc. on its Web site this summer with claims that its CDMA-based network provided higher data speeds and greater coverage than AT&T Wireless’ GSM/GPRS network. Sprint PCS said it singled out AT&T Wireless in its claims because it is perceived as the quality leader among business users.
The battle for business customers is expected to heat up further later this year when both Sprint PCS and Alltel Corp. plan to launch their own push-to-talk services.
