|
Backoffice & OSS
IMS Executive Forum: Cost Savings a Big Benefit of FMC
Panelists See Carriers Transforming into Media Companies
by Jim Barthold
Fixed-Mobile Convergence (FMC), considered by many to be
the leading reason to deploy the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS)
protocol, will not be the killer application that drives a new
telecommunications platform. Instead, said panelists at
FierceMarkets’ IMS Executive Summit in Washington, D.C.,
IMS will be driven by the cost savings it provides and the road
map it gives carriers to transform themselves from access
providers to media companies.
“It’s [FMC] unlikely to be the killer app that drives IMS…it
will be cap ex and op ex savings,” said Jim Grams, CTO of
Azaire Networks, speaking during a session
entitled, “Reaching Fixed-Mobile Convergence the IMS Way.”
IMS, Grams said, will be the “overlay architecture” that
gives “carriers … and applications developers another tool to
create new services” that will include FMC.
FMC, he added, will let incumbent carriers “defend and
extend” their businesses against outside non-carrier-based
providers because they “can continue to capitalize on their
assets” across different network layers.
The altruistic notion of any service, any time, over any
network to any device, is, in fact, farther down the road than
some initial FMC proponents would suggest, said Marc Price,
CTO of Openet Telecom.
Pointing to the cable industry’s joint venture with Sprint
Nextel, Price said that in the short term “a lot of what the
gains are going to be about is being able to provide these
bundles” of services across one provider’s business.
“We’re still in infancy” about standards,” Price said. “We’re
not talking about a pure IMS environment; we’re talking
about an IMS overlay on an existing legacy environment.”
That, in turn, will be facilitated by cost savings that both
wireless and wireline carriers can realize during what Grams
called a “relatively long convergence period … until you get to
this all-IP nirvana network.”
While there is “a lot of foot dragging that goes on around new
technologies,” Grams said that the process can and will go
faster when the benefits of acquiring new revenues and
saving on old processes is understood and implemented.
“Carriers aren’t dumb; they’re just relatively cautious,” Grams
said, suggesting that if vendors show these same carriers the
benefits of moving to IP and ultimately IMS, they will proceed
quickly.
|
