…is that there are so many to choose from. Verizon Wireless has teamed up with a number of equipment manufacturers in an effort to enhance the existing 3GPP IP Multimedia Subsystem (News - Alert) (IMS) specification. According to Executive Vice President and Chief Technical Officer Dick Lynch, the company has been working for nearly a year with a task force of the industry’s “best and brightest” from Cisco, Lucent, Motorola ( News - Alert), Nortel (News - Alert), and Qualcomm (News - Alert) .

Together these companies are proposing extensions to the IMS spec (they’re calling it A-IMS, for Advances to IMS) they’re that will cover the following: increased support of SIP and non-SIP devices and services; end-to-end security; and wireless VoIP QoS.

So are we seeing a major carrier change horses in midstream?

As Robert Liu writes in the upcoming September issue of Internet Telephony magazine, “Lynch and his team were quick to emphasize that the goal of A-IMS isn’t to splinter the IMS architecture, which has already been accepted by the 3GPP wireless governing body in its Release 5 and 6 specifications.”

Quoting Lynch, Liu reports that, “There is nothing here that is intended to in any way [degrade] or dismiss any of the work that has been done to this point in IMS.”

Indeed Lynch said, “We applaud the visionaries who have done a great job developing IMS over the last few years.”

Still it is altogether possible that competitors would interpret this initiative as a threat, despite assurances from Verizon et al that A-IMS will be open and public.

As Liu says in his analysis, “…for A-IMS to become an actual standard, the work will likely need the support of market leading TEMs such as Ericsson ( News - Alert) and Nokia (News - Alert), which is in the midst of merging with Siemens (News - Alert). For those dominant players to take advantage of the joint development, a vendor like Ericsson may have to reveal trade secrets like its proprietary security schema — a move that it might be reluctant to make.”

I guess the ramifications of the announcement remain to be seen. Verizon and company plan to take this proposal around to standards bodies including the IETF, 3GPP, 3GPP2, CableLabs and others to gauge their level of buy-in.

Joe McGarvey, Principal Analyst at Current Analysis agrees that time will tell. “At this point, it’s too early to say how this will turn out. If Verizon Wireless is sincere about moving this proposal through the traditional standards body and is open for some parts of it being rejected, it could have a positive impact on the overall IMS market. Even if that scenario is adopted, A-IMS will still have the effect of introducing delays and adding to the already complex IMS standards situation. However, I think modest delays and confusion would be acceptable if the end result is an improvement in the IMS standard.”

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