Q: Why are carriers ga-ga about push to talk?

A: They're not. They're jealous of Nextel's metrics: high ARPU and low churn. In an era of declining ARPU, carriers are grasping at anything that they think will help them in the metric wars. Higher ARPU, Lower Churn, Low acquisition costs. Well, two out of three is not too bad.

Anybody who has signed up with nextel and gone through setting up direct connect knows some pain (yes I know, nothing quite like a call to Sprint PCS customer care, which is has been considered as punishment for white-collar criminals recently...maybe Esrey could work off his tax burden by taking customer care calls for five years)

Here's a rant and rave about push to talk linked from Fierce Wireless. The author points out something that's both funny and on-target in Nextel's Ads:

Oh, sure, they also threw in the obligatory picture of a woman using the walkie-talkie feature. Only her picture is an inset, about one-quarter the size of the guys' pictures.

Plus, from the expression on her face, it doesn't really look like she's into the whole walkie-talkie thing. It almost looks like she's pressing the little button and thinking: God, this is so stupid! Why can't we just use it like any other cell phone?!

Whereas the guys - even the hassled construction worker - look like they're using the walkie-talkie and thinking: This is so cool! It's like when we were kids and played Army guy!

lol