Cable and Wireless Jamaica (C&WJ) in partnership with Jamaica's largest security firm, Guardsman Group Limited, is investing $250 million to roll out a new service, Push to Talk (PTT), that targets mainly corporate clientele.

The telecoms company is essentially offering clients a chance to use their phones as walkie-talkies, capable of communicating with up to 150 persons simultaneously from any C&WJ phone on the bmobile plan or PTT handset by the touch of a single button.

The service is to be offered at no additional cost to the caller or recipients.

As partners, Kenny Benjamin's Guardsman Group, which employs about 6,000 persons, has been using the product for a year under a market test. Through its communication division Guardsman Communi-cation, the group will sell the service on behalf of bmobile, the companies announced Wednesday.

C&WJ president and chief executive officer Rodney Davis declined to state the specifics of the partnership including investments made by each firm, but said they were pushing for market dominance in this segment.

MiPhone was first to market with a similar product.

Sizeable share

"We are comfortable that we can collectively, between the Guardsman brand and Cable and Wireless, take a sizeable share of the market place for Push to Talk," said Davis.

"We intend to be the leader in this."

Push to Talk will be offered both in pre-paid and post-paid packages but with more emphasis on the latter, which appears to be the preference of companies. Its target sectors include security services, hospitality, transportation, distribution, and manufacturing.

Mr. Davis said they were still finalising the pricing for the product. The company will distribute the Motorola brand of the walkie-talkies.

PTT operates on C&W's regular bmobile GSM network and its GPRS network. When it is used to call a regular GSM mobile phone the instruments converts the voice to data. The product also has roaming capabilities where a regular GPRS mobile phone with service for data roaming and a Motorola PTT device can receive calls from another PTT device overseas.

susan.smith@gleanerjm.com