U.S. wireless phone company Nextel Communications is set to begin a three-month scramble to expand the range of its popular DirectConnect walkie-talkie feature from coast to coast.

Initially, only Nextel subscribers in Boston, Los Angeles and Florida will be able to use Nationwide Direct Connect, which the company plans to introduce Monday. But a rapid-fire expansion is planned, with subscribers in San Francisco, New York, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., being added to the mix by June 16, the company said. By August, Nextel intends to include every city and market that it covers.

The service will cost $10 a month for unlimited use, or Nextel subscribers can pay on a per-minute basis, according to the company.

Nationwide Direct Connect is an example of "push to talk" (PTT), which creates a direct connection between cell phones--eliminating the need to dial a number and wait for a network connection. Other carriers plan competitive services by the end of the year. Most of Nextel's 11 million customers are mobile professionals; rival services will probably be more focused on the consumer market.

For the past 10 years, Nextel has exclusively offered PTT in North America. But its range was never more than a few hundred miles at a time. The company is now making it possible for the PTT conversations to travel on its Internet protocol backbone, used to ferry regularly dialed calls between cell phone base stations and broadcast antennas sometimes thousands of miles apart.

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