The IMS Forum is the telecom industry’s only association dedicated to IP Multimedia Subsystem (News - Alert) (IMS) application and service interoperability certification. Today it announced results from the third IMS Plugfest (“Plugfest III”) held October 15-19, 2007 at the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Lab (UNH-IOL).

 

The IMS Forum’s Plugfest I, completed in January 2007 at UNH-IOL, was devoted to interoperability and validation concerning VoIP and fixed mobile convergence (FMC). IMS Forum Plugfest II, held in June 2007 at the same lab, focused on interoperability and validations concerning VoIP services over IMS, and covered many aspects of the IP Centrex / IP PBX (News - Alert) and fixed-mobile converged calls, allowing customers to roam in and out between mobile and fixed networks. Other topics covered were security, IP PBXs and IP video

 

The IMS Forum Plugfest III delved into such areas as video, wireless, security, with an eye toward interoperability and certification. Vetted in this round of testing were multi-vendor security and the inter-working between home subscriber service (HSS) devices and the multi-vendor IMS core. In addition, IPsec and CSCF access security testing with multiple vendors proved that the basic security functions are all working as intended. The Plugfest also put inter-working with legacy 3G networks through its paces, and determined that vendors are successfully implementing AKA, the IMS-specific SIP specification, consistently.

 

Sixteen companies participated in Plugfest III: Acision (News - Alert), Argela Technologies, Aricent Technologies, Continuous Computing, CopperCom, Data Connection, Ltd. (DCL), Empirix, IPgallery, Mavenir Systems, Mu Security, NE Technologies, Radvision, Reef Point Systems, Sonus Networks, Starent networks and Tekelec (News - Alert).

 

In addition, the Forum issued an “IMS Report Card” capturing proof points from the Plugfest that it says refute a number of misperceptions and falsehoods that have dogged the widespread adoption of standards-compliant IMS solutions.

 

This section of the report nicely sums up the Forum’s conclusions: “IMS is being proven out by carriers now, including FT, BTT, BT, KTT and AT&T. Ericsson estimated that by the end of 2007, 100 operators will have begun implementing their IMS strategies with live network deployments. One Plugfest participant already enables ad-supported free video-conferencing. . . IMS eliminates costly service integrations. Migration from proprietary carrier TDM networks to unified IMS will evolve following the path of softswitching; Plugfests have demonstrated basic PTSN to IMS calls via currently available and already deployed gateways using existing TDM and IP infrastructure.”

 

A copy of the report, said to be the first in a series, is available on the IMS Forum Website at www.imsforum.org.

 

“We can speak with increased confidence that IMS is and will be moving forward rapidly regardless of the noise out there,” said Manuel Vexler, Chair of the IMS Forum’s Technical Working Group (which has three subgroups: Plugfests, White Papers and Best Practices).

 

“In terms of technology, more and more people are talking about IMS, and deployment is more a question of ‘when’ and ‘how’ its going to happen than ‘if’ it will happen,” Vexler said. “People by now pretty at ease that IMS will roll out. Now how it’s going to roll out is an interesting question. But it’s definitely coming.

 

“The tests went well,” Vexler said. “The way we measure the tests now in terms of progress from one Plugfest to another. First, we increased the number of test cases and in terms of testing, we went through a clear evolution of the type of services we’re examining, along with the compatibility and interworking between different IMS services. So what you’re observing in Plugfest III is that things are closer to the specs, and everything is working better together than ever before. We tested a bunch of services, including voice-over-IP, instant messaging, fixed-mobile convergence [FMC] and femtocells. We even tested some video sharing schemes, multimedia mail or ‘media mail’, some unified communications features, IP PBXs, and last but not least, we tested some of the Home Subscriber Server aspects such as mobility, which is part of FMC, and the DIAMETER stack.”