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IMS Magazine
December 2006 — Volume 1 / Number 6
Eye On IMS

Delivering on the Value of Convergence

By Grant F. Lenahan

 

IMS is the future. Consensus seems to be emerging that IMS is the basis of next-generationWhile technologically possible, for business reasons it’s best done through incremental change. IP-based networks, and that the investment will happen this time around. Yet another consensus seems to be emerging — belatedly in my opinion — that IMS must co-exist with both legacy networks and other IP-based constructs, such as web services and even quasi peer-to-peer SIP networks.

This may seem obvious, yet the last three years or so have been filled with questions of, “will IMS happen?”, “when?” and much standards activity that virtually ignores other protocols (other than SIP that is) and paradigms. For instance, service broker standards have so far ignored IN and web services. “If it’s not SIP, we won’t manage conflicts” seems to be the message. This is an odd reaction, since Telcordia has been delivering an “SS7 SCIM” since the early 1990s. Basic service interaction isn’t technology-dependent. In fact, it is even more critical across technologies.

So, are we beginning to build the next technology silo, called IMS? We better not.

I just spoke at a European-based industry conference that draws top-shelf speakers (plus me). The conference itself was quite interesting but more importantly it represents the closest thing to conformity for the army of bright, innovative radicals intent on overthrowing today’s telecommunications paradigm using VoIP, “free voice”, peer-to-peer and other pure Internet technologies. IMS concepts like control, tiered service and granular charging are not only overlooked, they are disliked. This is too bad. Control and network-based intelligence and data can be used for good. It is necessary to enable the truly global routing of sessions. It is necessary to support some latency-sensitive services. And customers may even choose it to provide better security and easier user experiences, areas where today’s Internet is, at best, suspect. As proof of this, remember that the Internet’s own routing directory — DNS — is a network-based service, not a peer-to-peer one. Just because historical telephone pricing (often done by national post offices, I’ll remind everyone) left something to be desired, is no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
What does this have to do with convergence and the migration to IMS? A lot, actually. It shows that somewhere between three and four technology paradigms will co-exist for many years, and thus our thinking can’t be “when will IMS take over?”, nor even “which supplier can build me the best IMS infrastructure?”, but rather “how do I build a flexible service creation environment that can enable services on IMS networks, legacy networks and Web 2.0 networks and interoperate across them?”

Our industry does not get paid for technology. It gets paid for providing services to customers. The more services and the more customers, the more we make. This sounds so simple as to be meaningless but our collective actions indicate otherwise. Every time we build a technology silo — even if we name it IMS and proclaim it the end of silos — we limit both the number of customers who can receive (and thus pay for that service) and the number of services we can possibly develop in each silo. So silos cost money and reduce revenues.

Today there are from 2 to 3 billion PSTN and Mobile IN/SS7 based phones. Because heavily compressed circuit-switched voice (such as GSM) uses scarce and expensive cellular radio spectrum more efficiently than VoIP, good old CS cellular will continue to grow for years. So we can comfortably count on most phones being IN, not IMS, for at least a decade, and a significant subset of all users for even longer — much longer.

Today there are also hundreds of millions of users of Skype (News - Alert), Yahoo, and other web-based voice and messaging services some of which use SIP but do not follow the IMS model. There is also huge growth in component services, and digital content on the web, and most of the web is comfortable using web services like SOAP (which could include Parlay-X). The web is also a cornucopia of innovation and content that can, and must, become part of services created in communication providers’ service creation paradigms. If not, they will be fighting with one hand behind their collective backs.

So this says that the future has at least three basic components — not just IMS. It certainly has IMS, steadily growing. It has the legacy networks, not going away any time soon, and representing huge potential. And, last but not least, the growing set of web players, web content and web development methods.

Years ago, the industry pursued wholesale technology shifts and tolerated closed, single-vendor service environments. We cannot re-make those mistakes. We need to think of large chunks of IMS as a modular, standards-based Service Delivery Platform (SDP). We need to make those service enablers — such as charging, policy control, subscriber preferences, interaction management, mobility, etc. — available to old networks and new, IMS and web. Only that way can we deliver the most services to the most customers with the simplest interoperability between all users and technologies.

Some day, maybe we’ll start thinking about service functionality separately from the underlying network technology. That day we’ll be on the road to real success. I guess that’s why my I recently presented a talk entitled “IMS form vs. function”. Is your business focusing on the functions you want to provide to your customers?

Grant Lenahan is vice president and strategist, IMS Service Delivery Solutions, at Telcordia Technologies, Inc. For more information, visit www.telcordia.com.

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