Ericsson will verify and integrate products according to the open, cross-vendor specifications for Push to talk over Cellular (PoC) that a group of mobile industry leaders, including Ericsson, defined in August 2003. The initiative will help prevent marketplace fragmentation by ensuring early alignment of terminals in anticipation of the expected growth of push to talk services and subscribers.

"Interoperability is a prerequisite for rapid uptake of new services, and this will help address that issue," said Bo Bergström, Vice President Product Strategy and Portfolio Management, Ericsson. "From its very first commercial deliveries Ericsson's push to talk system - Ericsson Instant Talk - will be interoperable with devices from other vendors."

Ericsson Instant Talk has already successfully connected the first push to talk calls on a public network. Trial activities will continue and the first commercial, PoC compliant end-to-end deliveries are scheduled for the end of Q1 2004.

Ericsson Instant Talk complies with the PoC specifications based on the 3GPP and 3GPP2 IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) and will operate in live, standards-based GSM/GPRS, EDGE, WCDMA and CDMA2000 networks. This will enable interoperable push to talk solutions to be deployed on a global basis.