IMS Moves Forward, Considers Applications

Ater months of talk about the promise of IMS to deliver converged services, operators are beginning trials on a few IMS-enabled services, and applications are becoming a hot topic.

ABI Research analyst Ian Cox says in the past year the industry has seen concrete progress on formulating IMS migration strategies, including voice call continuity between fixed and mobile networks and integrating PBX features into the standards.

“The handoffs between Wi-Fi, PSTN, GSM and CDMA will be the No. 1 IMS-enabled application initially,” says Harald Braun, president of Siemens’ networks division. “But the application layer needs to be built out further, which is going to be a focus going forward.” Siemens and Time Warner Cable recently completed a trial of IMS-enabled infrastructure support for seamless handover of calls across disparate networks, picture sharing, gaming and a movie locator service.

Microsoft Corp. is involved with TELUS for push e-mail and with Shanghai Telecom for hosted messaging via its IMS-enabling BSS system, Connected Services Framework.

And IBM Corp. is working with Swisscom on IMS application creation through a modeling environment for designing composite services in a reusable way so they simply can be extended to support new functionality instead of requiring an entire overhaul.

Ken Workun, director of business development at Atreus Systems Inc., says, “We have standards for the network layer, but standardization on the application layer is something the carriers are struggling with, and need to address as they migrate the network.”

To focus on the issue, Global MSF Interoperability (GMI) 2006 — a large-scale trial on the networks of British Telecom plc, Korea Telecom, NTT, Verizon Communications Inc. and Vodafone plc that will encompass network elements as well as applications — is scheduled for Oct. 16-27, while the IMS Forum has a plugfest scheduled for October that specifically will focus on applications, content and access.

While the networks still are separate today, says Michael Khalilian, chairman and president of the IMS Forum, “the application delivery is beginning to happen. Look at the Motorola ROKR combining iPod functionality and wireless voice, or IPTV or the cable industry writing IMS into DOCSIS. These are all elements of the transition to this framework for supporting traditional and next-gen services with a single, converged infrastructure.”