It's "push-to-talk" says India

Mobile phone company Hutchison Essar, a division of telecommunications giant Orange, has become the second of India's wireless companies in a week to start selling "push-to-talk", the walkie-talkie style mobile service.

Hutchison Essar's service, combined with one debuting from Tata Indicom, mark the first time push-to-talk has been offered in the Indian subcontinent and one of the rarer rollouts of the service outside the Western hemisphere.

Kyocera Wireless spokeswoman Mary Palmer said: "India beat everybody in the Eastern hemisphere." Kyocera is supplying about 300,000 push-to-talk phones to Tata Indicom.

Hutchison Essar, which uses the GSM standard, partnered with US-based Fastmobile to offer the service.

The successes or failures of the push-to-talk offerings will play a large role in determining whether other carriers throughout India offer competitive services, she added.

Push-to-talk technology allows callers to connect to other mobile phones with just the push of a single button, similar to a walkie-talkie. Only one person can talk at a time, and there is no need to dial a number. Motorola and US mobile carrier Nextel Communications introduced the technology about a decade ago.

For about eight years, difficulties perfecting such a service and the high price of push-to-talk handsets gave the two companies an almost exclusive hold on the market.

But now, "the button" is spreading globally - mostly because a carrier's cost of adding the service has dropped with the introduction of alternative push-to-talk technologies from Qualcomm, Kodiak Networks and other companies. The price of handsets with the feature also has decreased.

India's carriers are turning to premium offerings such as push-to-talk to differentiate themselves from their competitors, a sign that the largely untapped market is becoming more competitive and customers more mobile phone-savvy.

Countries such as India and China, where mobile phones are starting to take off, have become a major focus for handset and network equipment vendors. About 47 million of India's one billion residents subscribe to a mobile phone service. Analysts expect that number to triple to more than 140 million by 2008.

Ben Charny writes for CNET News.com