[asterisk-users] Push to talk over cellular with asterisk (was: Autoanswer in Nokia SIP clients?)

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Mon, Aug 04, 2008 at 03:45:32PM +0100, Gordon Henderson wrote:
> So I'll throw the cat amongst the pigeons by saying: Who cares about PTT?

Me.

> Seriously - Push to talk - Half duplex Communications. How ancient is 
> that! It's really reminiscent of ancient US style truckers - Smokey and 
> the Bandit and all that. That's just so last century. Lets put all that 
> behind us and get with the 21st century! We all have hands-free, full 
> duplex communications now, so lets just forget all that old rubbish and 
> get on with the programe.

Clearly, you don't work in an environment where PTT is a feature, not a
bug.

Lucky you.  :-)

> I think a provider tried it over here for a while - Orange IIRC, but they 
> charged an arm and a leg for it, so no-one used it. Everyone I talked to 
> about it just laughed. If I want to talk to someone with my mobile while 
> working, I use a bluetooth headset. I touch my "borg implant", say "HOME" 
> into it and it dials home... I'm not going to hold an E90 to my ear, push 
> a button, say "Hello? Can you hear me? Kchchchct" let the button go then 
> wait for a reply.

Amazingly, Nextel has made a pretty good living out of it over here for
almost 20 years, notwithstanding the number of subs they've lost
because they didn't budget the network expansion.

PTT communications have quite a number of advantages, actually, some of
which I itemized here:

	http://bestpractices.wikia.com/wiki/Nextel

though not all of them.

Clearly, they're popular enough that Sprint went through the 7 layers
of hell necessary to port QChat to EV-DO and make it interoperate with
the old iDen Direct Connect system, in observance of Metcalfe's Law.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                   Baylink                      jra at baylink.com
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