The MultiService Forum (MSF) announced the results of its recent GMI test event, claiming “a resounding endorsement of IMS as a mature, next-generation platform and an enabler for superior user experience for demanding applications.”
The biennial, multicarrier, multicontinent event spanned 12 days of testing in October and included 22 vendors, with engineers putting 225 devices through some 500 test combinations.
Verizon Communications Inc.(VZ) was the U.S. service provider host for the event, which also included networked test labs at BT Group plc and China Unicom’s mobile unit, University of New Hampshire’s Interoperability Lab (UNH-IOL) and the National Communications System facility.
While the 2006 version of the event focused on testing the IMS core, or framework, this year’s undertaking focused on services that can be enhanced by IMS and the networks over which they can be delivered.
“It is deeply satisfying to see two years of hard work by our members culminating in such a positive endorsement of the MSF’s campaign to ‘make NGNs work’ in the real world,” said Roger Ward, president of the MSF, in prepared comments. But, he added, “We must remember that the purpose of these GMI events is not to give us a pat on the back, but rather to provide industry feedback on what does and does not work in a real global network, and to point the way forward for development.”
Ward claimed the core IMS protocols “proved their maturity; the issues that arose were more to do with the complexity of the architecture and the importance of rugged implementation agreements to facilitate multivendor interoperability, particularly in the area of local configuration and options.”
A core and first-time focus of GMI 2008 was “the practical deployment of end-to-end IPTV services and this led to the world’s first successful demonstration of IMS-based IPTV.”
The tests, incorporating a soft client, video streaming server and IPTV applications server, included advanced user features such as video-on-demand pause and rewind and a network PVR.
Also of importance, the event tested several IPTV specifications that had been created by the ATIS IPTV Interoperability Forum (ATIS-IIF), which has focused on advancing IPTV deployment through standards efforts that often go beyond devices to tackle related issues, such as content security.
At a press event held at the Verizon lab in Waltham, Mass., during day 10 of the testing event, executives from the MSF, ATIS and Verizon discussed observations and reactions to IMS-IPTV testing.
Verizon reiterated its view of IMS-IPTV progress from the event yesterday, according to a report.
Most of the challenges, they stated, emanated from IPTV services being created largely in a silo separate from IMS. That, they said, is the reason why key data in video application servers and separate databases also needed to be included in IMS servers and databases to facilitate interoperability.
ATIS’ inclusion in GMI is worthy of note as it was the first time the MSF formally has partnered with a standards development organization.
