Sprint contacted us today to let us know that it owns the exclusive North American rights to Qualcomm’s QChat PTT technology, which raised a very interesting question: what the heck is Verizon using, then? PhoneNews is suggesting that Big Red’s actually using an upgraded version of BREWChat, Qualcomm’s old-skool PTT system that had originally been developed for and deployed on 1x networks.
If true, that’d be a big ol’ scoop of irony, considering that BREWChat had been billed all along as a precursor to QChat that would offer seamless upgrades to the newer system — but since Sprint scored exclusivity on it, it’s possible that Qualcomm is doing everything it can to skirt the issue and score some extra cash by hooking up BREWChat with some of its newer technology’s goodies. We’ll update this one as we know more.
