VON: more on AT&T's new network plan

Yesterday I posted a gut reaction to Siroos Afshar's talk on AT&T's new network plans.  Looking at the rest of my notes and surfing the (real) Internet today, I find there are zero hits for 'Common Architecture for Real-Time   Services' or 'AT&T CARTS' i.e. the name and acronym he used for their planned network.  So public presentation of CARTS must be relatively new!

Indeed, inquiry among some friends suggests there is a 180-page specification being circulated to major equipment providers under NDA.  I haven't seen it, so I can't give first party confirmation.  Also, while many VON presentations are available to registered conference attendees here, Afshar's is not.  Perhaps the little additional information in this post will be of use to someone.

CARTS seeks to decouple services from the various access networks and position their middleware to handle service logic, for all their services, using network databases of user preferences (including complete description of user devices) and user availability (presence).  His point about IMS was that it handled part of their requirements (centered on connection control) but was incomplete for AT&T's purposes.  He had a slide with a list of all the extra capabilities they needed, beyond IMS.  I wish I had transcribed that one (or photographed it), but no such luck.  I'll keep checking the PulverMedia site in case his presentation appears, but since it was on a Pulver server at the show yesterday and it's not already available to attendees, I'm not hopeful.