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IMS Magazine logo
February 2008 | Volume 3 / Number 1
Analyst's Corner

The Outlook for IMS in 2008

By Ronald Gruia 
While the migration to IMS appears to be the eventual NGN migration choice, certain developments in the final months of 2007 have raised some uncertainty about the exact time frame of the technology’s adoption by some service providers. On the positive side, there has been progress on the standardization front, with initiatives by bodies such as the 3GPP/3GPP2, ETSI (news - alert) Tispan and efforts such as A-IMS and IOT (Inter-Operability Testing) by the IMS Forum and by other industry forums. On the other hand, market development has been proceeding at a slower pace than originally anticipated.




In September of 2007, France Telecom (news - alert) signaled a change in its IMS strategy, favoring a more gradual plan. While the French incumbent had originally hinted that it would make public its primary IMS vendor choice before the end of 2007, later in the fall the company changed its tune, instead declaring that it was “too early” to disclose anything related to IMS. Another indicator of the more phased approach was the election of UMA (Unlicensed Mobile Access) instead of SIP/IMS (VCC) solution for its Unik network convergence offering.

In October of 2007, Dutch incumbent KPN documented some of its own issues with a strategy of moving quickly towards a single IMS core, including high costs, the associated requirement of a large volume of traffic (with only voice qualifying), and the difficult case for converged/blended services1. KPN made no secret about the fact that the current IMS industry approach was not meeting the company’s expectations, also criticizing the long lead times and limited flexibility of solutions presently available in the marketplace.

In addition, market pressures led operators to introduce several “pre-IMS” solutions. The increased popularity of “mashups” (web-based APIs combined to create new services executed on a client) has raised questions of whether waiting for all IMS service implementation issues to be solved is in fact the best strategy for carriers to embark on. Moreover, the well-documented launch of Google’s (news - alert) Android open mobile platform in November 2007 has added further uncertainty about the most timely approach to launching new services, and whether IMS system integration is a worthwhile proposition for operators.

So what do all these data points mean? Can they be interpreted as indicators of the demise of IMS? Not so, at least according to feedback received from other “avant garde” operators who did embrace IMS early (e.g. Vodafone (news - alert) and Telefonica) and others who are considering the technology. Another interesting view is that of the IMS Forum, which concluded in its own report that service providers will most probably build an IMS infrastructure in a “piecemeal fashion driven by individual IP service rollouts”2 . This would suggest that operators will continue to deploy services on parallel paths: some new offerings will be deployed within an IMS framework while others will be on either a “mashup” or even older “vertical stovepipe” fashion, depending on the business case, time-to-market and other considerations. The benefits that a mashup offers include an attractive cost, good time-to-market and a wide availability (when offered by an omni-present player such as Google). No wonder KPN has introduced a “cool” new Text Messaging Gadget which allows its subscribers who are also Second Life users to send 3 SMS text messages to their “first life” at the price of L$ 150.

Service providers will increasingly take some incremental steps towards an IMS infrastructure instead of continuing to stick with the legacy stovepipe architecture. That said it will be unlikely to see too many operators committing to a full blown “forklift” type of migration, as the bulk of their subscribers are still generating ARPU on IN platforms. The great preponderance of all this legacy gear means that it will be important to consider transitional strategies that will help service providers bridge the gap between the legacy and the new IP world.

As we highlighted in the December issue of IMS Magazine, some operators such as Telemar/Oi (Brazilian converged operator and the largest wireline carrier in South America) are taking a more gradual and pragmatic evolution, choosing to deploy services that can be accessed by subscribers regardless of whether they are being served by NGN or legacy infrastructure. Telemar’s pre-IMS approach enables the company to separate the timing of investments in NGN/IMS access layer infrastructure from the timing of introduction of new services.

RFP Outlook for 2008

While the IMS acronym might have not been as widely used in 2007 as it was in 2006, a closer look reveals that in fact there have been many positive indicators that suggest that the adoption of the technology is under way. Perhaps the smaller number of press releases containing the IMS buzzword is more of a hint that the technology has already passed through the first peak on its hype cycle and is now undergoing further refinements prior to becoming more widely deployed.

As the saying goes, “the proof is in the pudding”: there are a number of IMS RFP decisions that we expect will be announced in 2008, including, among others, the following:

China Mobile: (news - alert) decision expected in the second half of the year and the size of the deal is rumored to be in the US$ 200-400 million range.

Comcast: decision expected sometime in the first semester; the competition will be between NSN, Ericsson, Nortel and Alcatel-Lucent (news - alert).

France Telecom/Orange: while the timing of the announcement is still unknown (the results of the RFP were expected to be disclosed in Q4 2007), we believe that players such as Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, NSN and ZTE are still in the running. On the other hand, there are indications that FT may take a multi-step approach to IMS, by first moving to a VoIP architecture (which we think must be SIP-based if to transition to IMS).

T-Mobile USA: decision rumored to be in the first half of the year, with players such as Alcatel-Lucent, NSN and Nortel in the running.

Verizon: (news - alert) the timing of the announcement is still to be determined however there are rumors that this will be a close battle between Alcatel-Lucent and NSN.

Besides the above tenders, Chungwa Telecom just announced the NSN (Nokia Siemens Networks) as the winner of its own IMS RFP in early December 2007, a deal worth about 21 million Euros.

Much work remains to be done in 2008, on areas such as interoperability between older and newer networks, security, policy charging functions, and a wider availability of IMS handsets and clients. In fact, the last issue has not quite gotten the attention that it needs from the industry, with no major ongoing efforts to introduce some common IMS client standard other than a few “point application” initiatives such as the OMA (Open Mobile Alliance) PoC (push-to-talk application Version 1.0) specification.

In conclusion, operators will start capping their investments in current technologies and gradually begin to shift them to new equipment purchases. As they embark on their IMS migrations, there will be several paths open to them, including evolutions starting from the softswitch, signaling layer or service mediation (an incremental buildout starting from the SCIM component in the IMS architecture). In the interim, they might continue to pursue some other deployment options for certain services, but the end game will still lead to an IMS-like architecture.

Ronald Gruia (news - alert) is Program Leader and Principal Analyst at Frost & Sullivan covering Emerging Communications Solutions. He can be reached at [email protected].

Footnotes:

1 KPN presentation by Karl-Heinz van der Made at “IMS Strategies” in October 2007 entitled, “IMS: the Holy Grail?”

2 Please refer to the IMS Forum “Report Card” issued on October 2007 and available at http://www.imsforum.org/files/IMS-Report-Card-2007.pdf

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