Qualcomm and Tata Tele to Offer Push-to-talk

Tata Teleservices plans to launch push-to-talk on its CDMA service through Qualcomm's binary run-time environment for wireless (BREW) platform by the end of July 2004. This was announced at Convergence India, being held at Delhi. Built on Qchat technology, the solution will enable person-to-person and person-to-group communication between subscribers, at the push of a button. 

Tata Teleservices has reached an understanding with Qualcomm to roll out BREWChat-based services for up to seven million users. The service is initially planned to be introduced across Tata Teleservices' existing eight circles of operation. It will then be extended to 20 circles after the company rolls out the service nationally. BREW-enabled handsets are available in the market and newer models would also be introduced for this service. 

About interoperability of this service with different CDMA operators, Paul E Jacobs, group president, wireless and Internet group at Qualcomm, said that interoperability could be achieved by providing a gateway function.