IMS

For as long as I can remember, telecom vendors such as Nortel and Alcatel Lucent have been promoting the Internet Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) as the convergence platform for IP multimedia services for wireless and also for wired line networks. Each year at the CTIA Wireless event, these vendors would list the many potential services that IMS would enable such as presence, push-to-talk, instant messenging, and video call. Service providers also eagerly parlay IMS as a way to converge their service delivery platforms and to deliver “rich” IP multimedia services that end users would actually want and pay for. Well, this year at the CTIA Wireless show in Orlando, the industry seemed to finally got tired of the promises of limitless IMS application possibilities and pretty much stopped talking about IMS. Instead of positioning fixed-mobile convergence and next generation convergence services such as push-to-talk, some rather dull terms are being used such as “IP enabling IN services” and “business transformation”.

The acquisition of YouTube by Google must have also shifted the focus of the telecom industry as well. At the CTIA show, there clearly is much greater emphasis on delivering video over fixed and wireless networks. Of course the technology that service providers use to deliver such a service involves components of the IMS framework. But at least this time round, vendors and service providers are starting with the application rather than the application framework.

Currently there is no functional voice communications backplane on the web. Google tried with GoogleTalk but the lack of service interworking with the regular telephone network and the existing limitations of libjingle limit the usefulness of recombined voice service applications based on GoogleTalk beta.

Yahoo! has just launched Yahoo! Messenger with Voice 7.0 with broader support for PC to phone calling. This service offers even cheaper per minute rates than SkypeOut as noted by Stuart Henshall of Skype Journal. With extensive network cores, Yahoo!, Google, and other leading web portals are in pretty good positions to establish themselves as competing communications backplanes. I would suspect that over time, Yahoo, Google / AOL, Microsoft Live, and possibly ...Skype will all offer varying capabilities of a communications 2.0 backplane.

IMS (Internet Multimedia Subsystem) was all the buzz last year at Spring VON 2005. It continues to garner the attention of service providers especially fixed-line and cable operators this year at Spring VON 2006. However, there is one key change - vendors and carriers are starting to talk about integrating web services as service applications delivered over the IMS services framework.

With numerous meetings with many business partners and VCs, there was not much time for viewing the exhibits at VON. From what little time I had on the show floor, I did notice a few key changes: 1) many of the low-cost PBX vendors typically packaging open-source Asterisk are gone and replaced with a much bigger Digium/Asterisk Pavilion, 2) enhanced VoIP user terminals such as ATAs are now products than can be shipped in volume rather than demonstration units, and 3) less exhibitors are giving away freebies like useless blinking ice-cubes :-(.