The "Informer," writing in A Week in Wireless #268 today, quotes Li Mo, Chief Architect Officer of ZTE USA, apparently speaking at this week's IMS World Forum in Monaco, as saying "We analyzed hundreds of contracts, and practically all of them are softswitching, hardly IMS at all."
I wasn't there to hear it, but this strikes a chord. I have now seen the internals of operators' networks built by Ericsson, Nokia and Huawei and referred to as "IMS networks." In each case, what they have is voice services controlled by a pre-IMS softswitch (based on 3GPP Release 4) plus some kind of SIP infrastructure that they are using for new applications like Push-to-Talk.
I have even seen a confidential sales presentation from a major equipment provider using the term "IMS R4." Since IMS was first defined in the 3GPP release 5 specifications, "IMS R4" is not IMS. In credit to the company involved, this was obviously the act of their field sales guy, as Googling "IMS R4" returns no public mentions from that company.
In any event, what appears to be deployed today is pre-IMS or, as Dr. Li Mo says, "hardly IMS at all."
Hi,
I have been involved at the technical level in an IMS project at my company. I can assure you that your statement "what appears to be deployed today is pre-IMS" does not apply to ALL claimed IMS deployments - especially the one that I have worked on. So there are exceptions to your statement today.
Posted by: Srini K | May 15, 2007 at 11:23 AM
Srini, Thank you! I don't suppose there is any hint you could give about where this is? And/or what 3GPP release (5, 6 or 7) they are deploying??
Posted by: brough | May 15, 2007 at 08:03 PM
Aspects from Rel 5&6. I couldn't find a better link - The following is pretty dated - http://www.wateen.com/site_files/news.aspx?newsid=4
Posted by: Srini K | May 22, 2007 at 10:20 AM
Srini: Very interesting! A Motorola WiMAX system being deployed in Pakistan. I remember reading about this contract award in 2006 but I haven't heard anything since. This press release: http://www.motorola.com/mediacenter/news/detail.jsp?globalObjectId=7730_7659_23 implies they've deployed the network in Pakistan, but I can't decipher from the Wateen or Warid websites how the network is being used.
Five years ago, Motorola used Nortel mobile switches when they sold iDEN radio networks. In 2003, they acquired Winphoria Networks, a startup with a packet-based mobile softswitch focused on push-to-talk, but there's been little news since.
Posted by: brough | May 22, 2007 at 04:21 PM