Orange Pushes in Europe

LONDON -- Orange today announced the commercial availability of Talk Now™, Europe’s first advanced Push-To-Talk service.

Over the last nine months, Orange has engaged in customer trials across Europe to develop and refine the commercial Talk Now™ service, giving customers a new instant way of communicating alongside their existing voice and messaging services. It enables easy-to-access instant one-to-one and group calling with the added benefit of a real-time availability icon, so customers can see who is available to talk, and who is not. Customers can also create “team lists” that can be used to facilitate instant conference calling with up to 10 participants at any one time. Talk Now™ can also be switched to silent mode to ensure that people in the vicinity are not disturbed. It is available today from Orange Business Solutions in the UK, and will be available later in the year for UK small business and personal customers.

Orange UK will initially be offering a promotional Talk Now™ tariff, allowing corporate customers to make group calls for the price of a standard voice call. Following this, Talk Now™ customers will have the option of choosing either a bundle or a pay-as-you-consume tariff. Full commercial tariff details will be available once the promotional period has ended.

As well as the UK, Talk Now™ is due to be launched this year by Orange in France, then in Switzerland, the Caribbean, Romania, Slovakia, The Netherlands, the Dominican Republic, Belgium (Mobistar) and Jordan (Mobilecom) during the following months.

Orange named Alcatel, LG, Nokia, PalmOne and Sagem, as the first manufacturers in its Talk Now™ pan-European handset catalogue. The service will have a common user interface regardless of the handset. In the UK, the service will initially be available on the Treo 600.

Orange SA