A Modern Miracle: fastmobile Conducts World's First 'Around the World' Push-to-Talk Conversation - "Yes Dear I'm In A Cab In Paris...No Dear I Won't"

SCHAUMBURG, Ill. and KENT, England, Feb. 17 -- Leading mobile communications company fastmobile today announced that it has successfully conducted the first 'around the world' push-to-talk mobile phone conversation. Staff using standard Nokia 7650 and 3650 handsets running fastmobile's new push-to-talk application, fastchat, to speak to participants in Chicago, USA, Kent, UK and Henan Province, China, conducted the "walkie-talkie phone" conversation. fastmobile will be repeating its global push-to-talk demonstrations on its stand at the 3GSM World Congress, Cannes, France (February 17th-21st).

fastmobile plans to launch fastchat in both the United Kingdom and United States in the second quarter of this year and has plans for a subsequent roll-out of the service throughout Europe later in 2002.

fastmobile president and CEO Kang Lee, said: "Nearly three-years' development has gone into creating products that exploit the capabilities of GPRS networks to dramatically change how people communicate. It could easily generate as fundamental a change to our communication habits as email, and then SMS, did. Regardless, push-to-talk will certainly be one of the killer applications for this year, and it's now only weeks away."

Today's announcement follows a series of successful trials of fastchat, which included transatlantic "walkie-talkie" calls involving different handsets on different mobile networks. During the trials, group voice and text instant messages were sent simultaneously between participants. Tests used a compact fastchat client application running on standard Nokia 7650 and 3650 handsets with Symbian operating systems. A fastmobile server, untethered to any particular operator, managed the streaming of the digitized voice and text conversations across the GPRS data networks of US operator T-Mobile and UK operators Orange and Vodafone. The service requires no special hardware to be added to either the mobile handsets or the operators' networks.

fastmobile's European managing director, James Tagg, believes push-to-talk comes at a fortuitous time for the network operators. "fastchat is a new type of communication mode sitting in between a voice call and a text message. fastchat will enable people to have walkie-talkie style communications that are quicker to initiate than dialing the phone and where they pay only for the seconds they're speaking. This should stimulate voice and text ARPU and lead to new communications," he said.

fastchat is the second of what will become a suite of 'fast' services to be announced. The first, fastxt, a mobile instant messaging application, was launched to UK customers in November 2002.

About fastmobile:

fastmobile has operations in the US, Europe and Asia delivering value added messaging services over GPRS and other 2.5G and 3G mobile networks. fastmobile's first service, fastxt(TM), brings the power of instant messaging to mobile phones and will be followed with a range of innovative services that link the power of the internet to the immediacy of mobile.

The company is backed by private investment and venture capital from US companies Leo Capital Holdings, BlueStar Ventures and Red Barn Investments. The company raised $4 million in its first round of funding. For more information, please visit fastmobile's Web Site at http://www.fastmobile.com/ .

Source: fastmobile