Rural transit agency makes transition from LMR to push-to-talk-over-cellular (PoC) solution

In addition to transit agencies like SRTS, PoC applications are being adopted increasingly by companies with fleets of cement trucks that include sensors that monitor the usefulness of the cement for construction purposes, George said.

But the most significant PoC use cases often don’t involve cellular connectivity—hotels frequently are leveraging their considerable investments in their Wi-Fi systems to support push-to-talk applications for their employees, George said. Some hotels are giving employees Wi-Fi-enabled iPod Touch devices, which typically are much less expensive than an LMR radio or a smartphone, George said.

“There really is no one-size-fits-all [solution],” George said. “It’s really more about your network requirement. If you’ve got a good local area network with Wi-Fi, that’s the way to go. You save a lot money, and it’s self-managed—in a big hotel, you have and IT guy, and he owns the Wi-Fi network on site.

“We’ve seen hotels tearing out MOTOTRBO systems that are only two or three years old, and they probably spent $70,000 or $80,000 on each of those systems. We’ve seen them totally yank those out and just go to a PoC application.”

An enterprise’s willingness to transition from LMR to PoC may be influenced by the technological background of key decision makers, George said.

“In the old days, when you used to sell radios to a hotel or [other enterprise], the guy that you usually dealt with was one of the maintenance guys, maybe down in the boiler room or in the basement somewhere—he was the honorary radio guy,” he said.

“Now, when you go into a big hotel, the people you have to deal with are the IT guys, because the IT network is a very important part of a modern hotel. And IT guys are very comfortable with Wi-Fi, 3G and such, but they are nervous about radios—the last thing they want around their server rack is a bunch of RF.”