A few days ago I was talking with Bob Emmerson who, among other things, is the European editor for VON Magazine. Bob is writing an article on IMS, the IP Multimedia Subsystem defined by the mobile standards organization called the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). As I mentioned in my Supercomm notes, IMS was a hot topic at Supercomm.
In hopes of being quoted in Bob's article (ah, vanity, vanity...), I generated some quotable snippets. But since Bob might use, at most, one of these, I thought I'd throw them out for general consumption.
Here were my comments in no particular order...
1. IMS is the intelligent network (IN) of our decade. Yes, IMS's separation of signaling and transport is more efficient, and the potential access to new application development environments may help, but business issues and business relationships among telecom operators and major network equipment providers still dominate and these evolve slowly. IN was important (think free phone service, mobile roaming and prepaid) and IMS will be important, but lets not get carried away by the hype.
2. IMS focuses on the control of, and billing for, services provided over the packet bearer channels of 2.5G and 3G mobile systems (or potentially any form of IP access). I.e. IMS is the ultimate walled garden.
3. There are 1.8B mobile phones in the world today, almost all controlled by IN-based circuit-switches. Even new 3G-324M mobile video telephony services run over 64 kbps circuit-switched data service. Today, there is no economic justification for replacing this circuit-switching equipment, so first generation IMS deployments will involve hybrid IMS-IN operation. Operators and equipment suppliers realize this and are designing hybrids accordingly. So it's hype to label something "IMS equipment." Most of today's "IMS" products should, optimistically, be labeled "IMS-ready, but deployable today."
4. Like IN, IMS comes in several revisions (3GPP Rlse 5, Rlse 6, etc.), most not fully baked at this point, and additional revisions will emerge over the next decade. This is very early days for IMS and, just as happened with IN, each equipment vendor will conform to one revision and offer "pre-standard" extensions in an effort to lock in customers. IMS realities look like IN realities, offset by a decade or more.
5. Operators need new applications with new revenues to justify investment in IMS. So far the leading candidates are push-to-talk (PTT) and fixed-mobile convergence. But today, the proprietary PTT service on Nextel's iDEN network easily out performs IMS-based PTT. That may change with higher bandwidth mobile data paths (3.5G?), but for next few years it's hard to see PTT as a major new revenue source in North America.
6. In the developed countries, mobile operators are running out of new consumers to sign up, so they are turning their eyes towards the enterprise. Fixed-mobile convergence looks like a product they can sell to enterprises. Fixed-mobile convergence is the application that will drive the first few years of IMS deployments.
7. SIP (with SDP, RTP, etc.) was originally a solution for peer-to-peer communications sessions, notably peer-to-peer telephony. Subsequently, various IETF working groups have extended the SIP family of specifications to support every kind of telephony that has ever existed, specifically including central control of dumb devices. It's difficult to see how SIP proponents can complain that 3GPP has distorted the original vision of SIP (as a peer-to-peer protocol) when the SIP community has already done the same thing. It sounds like the real issue is "whose in charge?"
8. In the future, fixed and mobile broadband Internet access (WiFi, WiMAX and 3.5G/4G) will be widely available from multiple competing providers. This means market forces will kill the walled garden and wireless broadband access will be widely available. Given 3rd party VoIP services (Vonage, Skype, etc.) can run over anyone's broadband connection, it's hard to see today's mobile vendors maintaining their lock on voice services. Neither Skype nor Vonage uses or needs IMS...
9. On the other hand, consumers like simplicity and flat-rate bundles, so an agile wireless operator should be able to concoct profitable offerings despite the changes the next decade will bring. IMS is a likely platform to deploy and scale those service offers, so I expect NMS will have a continuing opportunity providing media solutions to the major equipment providers for IMS infrastructure.
NMS & IMS: However much I personally prefer the chaos and rampant experimentation of the open Internet, we make our money supporting solutions for mobile operators. Currently NMS is the largest supplier of open platforms for media services (media servers, etc.) -- the result of our solutions being incorporated into equipment from major IN & IMS suppliers like Alcatel, Lucent, Comverse, NEC, etc. So we've sold a lot of products that have gone into IN infrastructure and, over time, we expect to sell even more into IMS infrastructure.
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