Alltel To Launch PTT

Alltel Corp., a large regional CDMA carrier, has announced that they will begin offering PTT in select markets by Jan. 22. Launching with one Kyocera handset and priced at $5/mo for 100 person-2-person minutes. A higher-tier of service is $20 for unlimited P2P or 100 minutes of group calling. Alltel will use technology from Kodiak Networks, who have been claiming to have a large US CDMA carrier on board, and who recently launched with Orange in Europe. Kodiak uses radically different, non-standard technologies, but claims to get much better performance than the Winphoria solutions that Sprint PCS and Verizon are using. Kodiak works equally well in GSM and CDMA networks, so it will be interesting to see how the battle of the PTT technologies pans out.