Much has been written in recent years about IP Multimedia Subsystem, or IMS—a new communications technology that seems poised to alter fundamentally how a variety of services, from voice to television, are delivered and accessed.

 

There’s been so much talk about IMS that, sometimes, the topic becomes rather muddled. To cut through the confusion, RadiSys—a company that specializes in AdvancedTCA (News - Alert) (ATCA)-based computing and networking solutions—recently published “IMS for Dummies,” in conjunction with Intel.

 

In the book, IMS is defined as “the most advanced carrier-grade service delivery architecture yet developed. It is an open industry standard, and can be used to deliver communication services seamlessly to any device and across any access network.”

 

IMS can be broken down into a number of key capabilities. These include:

 

At its core, the main distinction that should be made about IMS, RadiSys said in the book, is that it does away with the old system of delivering services on individual, disparate networks in favor of creating one, ubiquitous communications network. While IMS is new, and deployments may seem confusing, ultimately the technology will liberate both companies and consumers.

 

“Like the Internet revolution of the 1990s, “fixed-mobile” convergence can benefit both consumer and business subscribers with new service combinations and productivity enhancements,” RadiSys said in the book.

 

A number of important trends are driving IMS adoption and the communications convergence that it’s enabling. These include:

 

IMS offers a variety of benefits to carriers and service providers. Some of those benefits include:

 

To learn more about IMS, including how it was developed, the industry organizations that maintain the standard, and why the technology’s focus on applications matters, order a free copy of “IMS for Dummies” by clicking here.

 

Details about RadiSys’ ATCA solutions can be found on the company’s TMCnet.com channel, ATCA.