Voxer Pro Business turns your smartphone into a walkie-talkie.
Smartphone walkie-talkies are not new, of course -- Nextel, which got swallowed by Sprint, used to offer a unique push-to-talk, or PTT, walkie-talkie cellphone feature called Direct Connect.
Nextel's simulated half-duplexing service mimicked walkie-talkies but ran over spectrum similar to that used by cell networks. The all-voice service was popular with fleet and dispatch users but never took off across all user bases.
Recently we've been seeing two services that have historically been natively run over their own channels, or frequencies, now simply becoming one element of the wireless service we call data. They are text messaging and PTT.
Voxer is a similar disrupter, and if PTT were remotely popular as a service, it would have the wireless networks quaking. It's no coincidence, though, that data plans are getting less "unlimited." Lose one revenue source, make it up somewhere else.
However, by using Internet over a wireless network rather than sending services over narrow cell-like radio frequencies, both services improve on earlier offerings. In the case of PTT, it's by adding multimedia.
Voxer could conceivably give the dying PTT model a kick because it's less specialized than Nextel and its voice-only ilk were, and it doesn't require its own frequencies, special masts or indeed a bustling dispatch office with a yard full of trucks.
Comments :