Will IMS Help the Smartphone Industry?

I’ve started shopping for a new 3G phone. My requirements (I thought) were fairly basic. I wanted a phone with 3G and Wi-Fi capabilities, with a physical keyboard and touch screen display. My search quickly reminded me why customers move from one carrier to another. The right phone was not with my carrier which serviced me for the last six years or so. Oops.

A closer look at the smartphone shows that this industry is the opposite of the PC industry, where Microsoft is undisputedly the dominant force. Each type of smartphone comes with its own operating system, applications and services, and, of course, apps store. (May I remind that the apps store pre-dates Apple’s iTunes by more than five years?)

So is the world of smartphones converging along the same lines as the core of service providers’ networks? The first answer is no, of course not. In the last 12 months, Google launched its own Linux-based smartphone and Palm came up with the Palm Pre Web OS. There is, however, a silver lining in the evolution (and increased fragmentation) of smartphone markets. Service providers are starting to realize that their customers are no longer “one size fits all” and that customizing services and applications are the way of the future. Companies such as AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint are building special plans for their “hot” smartphones as they are creating more and more churn among their customers.

Let’s analyze the same market from the point of view of a service provider. Churn means increased cost of operations and unpredictable changes in revenues from one quarter to another as new phones are issued and customers move from one provider to another. A new smartphone — especially a model with new operating system — increases the cost of support and puts more pressure on the customer service front and back offices. The expectations are higher and higher, and service provider hype adds fuel to the fire. Can the service providers keep their promise and deliver the bandwidth and quality of experience? There is no easy answer to this question, as quality of experience for a multimedia user involves multiple factors from network availability and downloading speeds to the stability of the application on the smart phone and the capacity of the crashing servers. Also, there is no established relationship between quality of experience (QoE) and quality of service (QoS). There are, however, a few simpler metrics to consider. The QoS is necessary for many of the new applications used in smartphones. For example, video conferencing, multi-party games,and GPS location services require more than “best effort” from the network. Let's consider a GPS in a car moving at 60 mph. For each 100 milliseconds of network delay the GPS will show a nine foot error.

There is also another aspect. As the new generation of smartphones is getting close to the look and feel of iPhones, service providers will be looking into how to make more money from applications. To this end, we can argue that Apple has a larger share of profit in the smartphone business than the operators. The relationship changes if an operator can offer a guaranteed QoS or QoE. In this case, operators can focus on differentiating the customer experience they provide, not the form factor of the phone. As they standardize on the phone interfaces, their echo system will rebalance.

Manuel Vexler is chair of the technical working group in the IMS Forum. He is well known for his expertise in voice and multimedia over Internet, bringing more than 20 years of experience to roles such as the CTO of CopperCom and vice president of IMS Interoperability at the IMS Forum. He drove M&A at Cisco, and launched new technologies at CopperCom, AMD, Alcatel (Newbridge) and Nortel.