How Much of a Threat is Sprint’s New Push-to-talk Service to the US LMR Industry?

Wellingborough, UK - 30th September 2011. Three days ago Sprint announced that it was launching a new Push-to-talk over Cellular (PTToC) service over its CDMA network in the US. Recent years have seen the number of iDEN PTToC users on Sprint’s network dwindle to around eight and a half million, will this new service be able to revive PTToC’s fortunes in North America and could this be a threat to the wider Licensed Mobile Radio (LMR) industry in the US?

“There is certainly pent up demand for a PTToC service from licensed mobile radio users in the US” stated Alex Green, Senior Research Director at IMS Research. “IMS Research surveyed around 400 licensed mobile radio decision makers in the US about PTToC recently and the results showed that most users were using cellular and that the addition of a good PTToC service would be highly valued.”

“The survey also showed that as well as pent up demand for PTToC, there was also pent up demand for data services where LMR networks were falling short. So Sprint’s strategy of aligning its new PTToC service with a cellular broadband data service is a smart move.” continued Green. “The feature list detailed by Sprint also ticks a lot of the LMR feature requirements highlighted in our survey. For example status request and group calling functions.”

But on the question as to whether the LMR industry should be worrying, the survey would suggest not. The survey results showed that the most important features of an LMR network were ones that would be extremely difficult to replicate on a cellular network. Direct mode operation (i.e. communication without infrastructure), guaranteed network access, and extremely fast call set-up times were all ranked very high in terms a required feature list. The overwhelming majority of the 400 survey respondents stated that would not consider replacing their LMR network with a PTToC service.

“In conclusion, I think Sprint’s new service will be very appealing to LMR users who are looking for a complementary service to the functionality offered over their private networks. For those, the Sprint service may well look a lot more attractive than services offered by competing mobile network operators. However, for most current LMR users, it would only be as a complement to their private networks, not a replacement” summarized Green.

For more information on IMS Research’s report “PTToC - A Survey of North American LMR License Holders” please contact Alex Green (Alex.Green@IMSResearch.com), +44 1933 402255