Smoothing Out IMS’ Camino del Oro

There couldn’t be a bigger buzzword than IMS these days, and to hear the industry “hypesters” tell it, the architecture is the key to a broadband-enabled goldmine of services that can be thought of and reliably launched the same day. Maybe so, but like Cortez hunting for the Seven Cities of Gold, modern-day service provider conquistadores may find a few roadblocks on the Camino del Oro. The MultiService Forum (MSF) plans to address these in a global interoperability exercise in October.

Reliable, transparent and dynamic support from the network, and automatically configured OSS and billing are necessary to enable those access-, device- and location-agnostic services that are customizable by the user that we keep hearing about. But the evolution to IMS will be a slow migration, constrained by the need to monetize existing assets and support customers on siloed, legacy networks. New services represent new revenue, potentially: “IMS does indeed represent the best -- and perhaps the last -- chance for incumbent service providers to avoid becoming dumb pipe operators," says Joe McGarvey, principal analyst at Current Analysis Inc. However, deploying new network elements and OSS is expensive, as we all know, and the ROI model for IMS doesn’t support a forklift upgrade. During the network transition, new elements must interoperate with existing ones, making for a hybrid, multi-vendor mishmash for the foreseeable future.

In an IMS-enabled network, one common architecture and subscriber database allows any service to use a variety of IP stacks to communicate with any device over any network. Because IMS allows wireless and wireline providers to use a common IP profile to deliver current and future multimedia services, that will entail roaming -- from provider to provider and network to network. Operators also are challenged to provide IMS services under all coverage conditions, be it narrowband or ultra-bandwidth.

Thus, now more than ever, vendor interoperability is a critical link in the successful deployment of any personalized IMS or FMC service.

“The gap for IMS deployments is the practical implementation of these next-generation networks,” says Roger Ward, president of the MSF and a member of British Telecom plc’s CTO office. “All players need to interoperate with more people than they usually do business with. IMS is a polestar, and there will be lots of legacy interworking and most service providers will have hybrid networks. Nonetheless, the services must work.”

To that end, the MSF is spearheading GMI 2006, Oct. 16-27, a two-week, intensive event to test multivendor interoperability to achieve fixed-mobile convergence, supporting the IMS service framework.

The organization has released the MSF Release 3 Implementation Agreements, technical specifications that take existing standards and present recommendations for the move to practical, physical scenarios for IMS implementation; the idea is to put those into practice and see what happens.

BT, Korea Telecom, NTT Group, Verizon Communications Inc. and Vodafone plc will join their networks together, spanning three continents. Aside from the service providers, the participating members to date include: Acme Packet, Alcatel, Cisco Systems Inc., Empirix Inc., Ericsson, ETRI, Huawei Technologies, IP Unity, Leapstone Systems Inc., Lucent Technologies Co. Ltd., MetaSwitch, Mitsubishi Electric Corp., (National Communications System) NCS Corp., NEC, Newport Networks Ltd., NexTone Communications Inc., Nortel Networks, Operax AB, Samsung, Siemens AG, Softfront, Sonus Networks Inc., Spirent Communications, Starent Networks Corp., Tekelec and ZTE Corp.

“GMI 2006 will accelerate the introduction of new enabling capabilities such as presence and group management and the seamless blending of these new capabilities with IP-based telephony and video communications,” says Helmut Hoffmann, director of global networks at Vodafone Group. “When these are integrated with roaming, users will be able to enjoy rich media communications uninterrupted as they move between locations."

There are six physical scenarios that will be tested: single domain with nomadic subscribers; single domain with nomadic subscribers with SIP and Parlay/OSA applications running on top; IMS interconnection between legacy and IMS domains; roaming of terminals and subscribers between domains; roaming of terminals and subscribers between domains with value-added applications on top; and finally management and provisioning of multitechnology multi-site VPNs and value-added services across domains.

“IMS represents big hype, but a functional architecture,” says Ward. “The devil is in the details of the actual implementation. We hope to take things one step closer to reality with GMI 2006.”

Current Analysis Inc. www.currentanalysis.com
MultiService Forum www.msforum.org
Vodafone Group www.vodafone.com

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