"AVEA has long intended to become the first operator launching advanced new services for the Turkish market," said Cahit Paksoy, Board Member and CEO, AVEA.

"AVEA strongly believes in attracting new customer segments by providing high-value applications, and we see push to talk as one of the most attractive mobile voice services for our market," he continued.

Being "the alternative operator," Paksoy notes, has brought the real competition to the sector. Avea offers new products and opportunities, different tariffs to different groups for the usage of both individual and corporate customers in the private and public sectors. At the same time, he explains, Avea offers many first time services with the highest quality and the most convenient prices through making use of all the advantages of the new technology and in this respect, has been the pioneer as the technology leader in the GSM sector.

"Nokia is pleased to have been selected by AVEA for PoC service deployment," said Murat Kircuval, General Manager, Networks, Nokia Turkey. "Nokia and AVEA share a common vision about the great potential of the Turkish market for adopting new applications and services, starting with push to talk."

In addition to PoC and Presence, Nokia will provide installation, commissioning and project management services as well as consultancy for the integration of PoC to the billing and mediation systems. The services will be supported using Nokia NetActa, the only fully featured, multi-vendor, multi-technology operations support system on a single platform. With commercial contracts with 30 operators, Nokia is leading the market for Push to talk over Cellular in GSM.