The Business Case for IMS

By Richard “Zippy” Grigonis
Tekelec (www.tekelec.com) is a network applications company with experience in session control that’s helping service providers transition to IMS networks. Travis Russell, Tekelec (News - Alert)’s Manager, Product Marketing, says, “IMS is really an implementation standard for VoIP in a wireless network. It actually doesn’t bring any new technology to the table; if one reads the 3GPP specifications for IMS, it calls out many existing protocols used in VoIP today, with new requirements for routing, authentication and authorization. The intent is to standardize how SIP gets implemented to ensure that wireless networks remain secure and reliable.”

“White it’s true that IMS enables many new services, the same can be said about conventional IP-based networks today,” says Russell. “In fact, many operators counter that they can deliver everything that IMS promises to enable without deploying an IMS architecture. This is true, although the problems with this approach are many. We already know from our experiences with the Internet that ensuring services are delivered only to those having authorized access is troublesome.”

Russell elaborates: “Conventional VoIP works well in a network where subscribers are not paying for each service. For example, the ‘all you can eat’ model where subscribers pay a flat fee for access to various services. However, in our telecom model where revenues are generated through service usage, new mechanisms are needed to prevent fraudulent access to these services.”

“The Call Session Control Function [CSCF] introduced in the IMS specifications provides a means for operators to better manage all of the traffic in their networks,” says Russell, “and collect the revenues for that traffic reliably. It also ensures that the operator doesn’t have to purchase multiple OSS/BSS to handle the various functions such as provisioning and billing based on technology. In the IMS model, everything is shared across all services. This means that one billing system is capable of supporting voice, video, email, messaging, and any other service the operator is providing to their subscriber base. This is not the case in today’s model where each service type brings its own proprietary requirements for OSS/BSS.”

“There are several new options outlined by 3GPP for charging of services in the IMS model that solve the age-old problem operators see today with multiple billing platforms,” says Russell. “By standardizing on the way the various network entities report and generate billing records, operators can deploy one charging platform for the entire network. This eliminates the need for multiple rating, mediation, and billing systems in the network.”

One Step at a Time

At Oracle (News - Alert) (www.oracle.com), Indu Kodukula Vice President of Product Management for the Oracle Service Delivery Platform, says, “Initially, when IMS was formulated, everybody thought it was going to be the solution to all the problems the telecom industry had about rolling out next-gen data services in a portable manner. What we’re seeing is that the principles of IMS, with regard to the separation of control between the service layer and the full network, are very much in evidence. We see that across the board.”

“IMS rollouts literally follow in the specifications laid down by 3GPP and 3GPP2. From our perspective, we see three main reasons for that,” says Kodukula. “First is that the rollouts have been pretty expensive. Interoperability has been a challenge and even devices haven’t really been available that are IMS-enabled. So rather than rolling out a full-fledged IMS network that could easily cost hundreds of millions of dollars, many providers are taking a wait-and-see approach and they’re trying to find ways they can roll out an ‘IMS Lite’ network or something similar where they can test out the feasibility of IMS-like services without the expense of IMS.”

“Second, it’s not that clear what will be the compelling or ‘killer’ IMS applications,” says Kodukula. “Rather than a roll out costing hundreds of millions of dollars and investing that kind of capital expense, what we’re seeing are operators adopting a more horizontal platform which is a service delivery platform that really provides network agnosticity and supports portability of services so that when IMS ‘happens’, they will be able to migrate services using SDP [Service Delivery Platform] technology on top of the IMS network without having to rewrite the applications.”

“The third dimension that we see to this is that no one is switching to an IMS network overnight,” says Kodukula. “Initially some providers and vendors in this industry wanted to do a ‘forklift’ of their existing network and essentially plop in a new, IMS network. Definitely in the last 12 months, however, the trend or mood has changed. Now operators increasingly want a way to build and deploy IMS services on the network without having to do a forklift, thus taking an elemental, step-by-step approach to IMS rollout.”

“Still, we feel very positive about this market,” says Kodukula. “We provide a standards-based Oracle Service Delivery Platform as a way to build portable applications that run on today’s network and that can also be delivered on next-gen networks such as IMS, SIP, WiFi and WiMAX (News - Alert). We offer a flexible platform that enables portability of services across multiple networks. That’s something we see resonating very well with our service provider customers.”

Dialogic (News - Alert) Corporation (www.dialogic.com) makes open systems platforms that enable converged communications so that service providers, developers and system integrators can deliver services content and applications using multimedia processing and signaling technologies.

Alex Mushkin, Dialogic’s Product Manager for Multimedia Platforms, says, “IMS definitely has useful aspects. As I see it, there are two sides to the matter. There is a technical side that makes IMS make sense, which involves the infrastructure, in particular wireless carriers moving to the IP-only infrastructure. And there are cost savings after you move everything to IP, which I think is pretty much proven at this point. On that side, those drivers are definitely making things happen.:

“On the other hand,” says Mushkin, “on the business side, there’s a bit of uncertainly and ambivalence. Carriers are pushing for an open standard that presumably gives more freedom, and yet they’re still trying to maintain a universal solution within a sort of virtual walled garden. That’s an obstacle on the business side.”

“The bottom line is what consumers are willing to pay, says Mushkin, “and right now they don’t seem to be willing to pay a great deal. But there are some areas that we see may be useful and those are telephony-related, such as call centers and PBX (News - Alert) features, that are not easily replicated in a pure IP environment.”

“Security and billing were challenging in the old days of telecom and they will probably continue to be until they problems they pose are completely solved, be it for IMS or any other specification,” says Mushkin.

“Obviously, the whole infrastructure won’t be completely replaced in a year, five years or even ten years,” says Mushkin. “It will be a cautious, gradual process. But on the road to that day, our customers are discovering that even just pieces of IMS deployed can be useful. The media server is one such useful element. Some billing-related features are another, as are related features and interfaces, such as what one sees with the DIAMETER protocol. IPv6 is also an example of a useful feature that can evolve even if IMS doesn’t materialize in the way it was originally designed.”

Letting the Chips Fall Where They May

Centillium (News - Alert) (www.centillium.com) is a communication integrated circuit (IC) company that focuses on developing technological solutions that expand communication bandwidth to the Internet.

Centillium’s Director of Technical and Strategic Marketing, Dr. Majid Foodeei, says, “We take a unique semiconductor, ‘chip’ view of all this. I’ve been active in the VoIP segment, where many IMS-associated things have already happened – for example, moving to an all-IP environment, or smarter customer premise equipment, or the role of SIP and other common technical mechanisms. Our top three customers in the VoIP area include our two top OEMs, Alcatel Lucent and Ericsson (News - Alert). So as a chip vendor we have seen a drive toward IMS. Our chips often end up in media gateways, which serve the ‘multiple silos’ of fixed and mobile services. There’s a whole host of access types. There is a big drive among these OEMs to merge their platforms. So, when you come across mergers, such as Alcatel Lucent and Siemens Nokia (News - Alert), they had departments of fixed communications, departments of wireless – probably multiple flavors of wireless, from CDMA, UMTS and so forth, and slowly the drive from the organization’s top is that they’ve got to have a converged platform.”

“Service providers are making their decisions under the guns of layoffs and cost reduction, and driven by the accepted guidelines of a gradual adoption of IMS and IMS-type functionality that service providers go by and have accepted over the longer term,” says Foodeei, “they really make their decisions based on those. Having said that, there is a contradictory thing that we see, which really slows this process: all of the legacy deployments for fixed and wireless, which have tons of customers. So doing a converged platform doesn’t happen overnight.”

This article is continued on the tmcnet.com website at www.tmcnet.com/1372.1.

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