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Carrier Services
Lucent Continues IMS Push
Vendor Adds BellSouth to Customer List
by Jim Barthold
Some observers think Lucent Technologies waited too long to enter the IP space; it’s not making the same mistake with IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) protocol. The telco vendor recently added BellSouth to its growing stable of IMS customers with a deal that both sides say lays a foundation for BellSouth’s IMS architecture.
The BellSouth deal is not as detailed as ones Lucent brokered with Cingular and SBC where IMS will be used to merge the two carriers’ networks and applications. BellSouth co-owns Cingular with SBC but has announced no plans to use Lucent’s IMS gear to converge its wireline and wireless services.
“You can’t lump BellSouth’s deployments in with the Cingular and SBC deployments in terms of IMS, in terms of the comprehensive products that are being used,” said Joe McGarvey, senior analyst-carrier infrastructure at Current Analysis. “What they purchased from Lucent was a portion of their IMS portfolio, but it’s essentially the Telica softswitch and media gateway that (Lucent) acquired from Telica.” Lucent made that clear as well.
“What we’re doing with them is specific to their voice business and their voice-over-broadband in particular,” said John St. Amand, president of Lucent’s converged core business solutions group. “We’re doing a consumer voice-over-IP offering with them over their DSL in their nine state territory deploying our softswitches and media gateways.”
Voice-over-broadband using DSL can be accomplished without IMS. With IMS as a foundation, however, “(BellSouth) can start building up an applications’ suite that is not just typical voice services,” St. Amand said.
He agreed that IMS is best known for converging wireline and wireless networks and applications, “but if you look at any wireline operator who wants to offer some peer-to-peer video service, all this is enabled through IMS and has nothing to do with the mobility aspect of it.”
McGarvey said that the deal laid an IMS foundation for BellSouth and gave Lucent a foot in the carrier’s door when that foundation develops into wider reaching multimedia activities.
“Obviously Lucent is in much better shape. Not only do they have their gateway in there and their media gateway controller, they also have network integration which puts them in a nice position to recommend further technologies,” he said.
While Lucent’s IMS relationship with Cingular is likely to come into play, “there’s nothing stopping BellSouth from going to someone else at this point,” McGarvey added.
Lucent’s BellSouth deal shows the depth of its IMS-based products, said St. Amand.
“We have all the elements of an IMS solution,” he said. “Any other vendor who may claim IMS would only have pieces of it.” It is, said McGarvey, a valid distinction, especially since the term IMS is becoming a bit overused and shopworn.
“There are a lot of cases where I accuse vendors of throwing IMS around too much,” he said. “I’ve done that with Lucent in the past, but not so much in this case. I think they did a good job of spelling out exactly what this is and they’ve made it clear it isn’t identical to the deployment they announced at Cingular and SBC.”
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