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Networks & Infrastructure
VON Fall 2006: IMS: An Enabler, Not a Panacea
Verizon Speaks Out About IMS
by Sean Buckley
At this year’s Fall VON show in Boston, there won’t be any shortage of announcements and perspectives on IMS. Like its service provider brethren, Verizon has an IMS plan in place. Stu Elby, Verizon’s vice president of network architecture and enterprise technologies, will tell you that the benefit of IMS is having a more efficient mechanism to deliver a rich set of services. Elby recently sat down with Editor Sean Buckley to discuss Verizon’s IMS strategy.
Q. Tell me about your view of IMS. From a wireline perspective what capabilities and features does it bring?
A. We [have been] deploying pre-IMS and softswitch gateway capabilities for a large number of years and a lot of minutes traverse it. What that means is—whether it’s VoIP or anything else—you go back to the marketplace to get new features, functions and a lower price. We’re in a natural cycle timing for that, and at this juncture in the evolution of the technology, we would not be going back to market for a vertically integrated softswitch.
The motivation is infrastructure and cost reduction and not service capability. It’s just a better way to bring new services to market. However, those are not things we would not be able to do without IMS. In fact, we always launch new VoIP and multimedia services between Verizon Business and Verizon Telecom. This next-generational platform will allow us to do a quicker time to market. Like Verizon Wireless, we see the same limitations on the wireline side with IMS. We don’t see IMS as a panacea to solve the world’s problem in the IP space. It has a role to play, but it has to fit in well with non-IMS services, which includes transaction services, Web services, residential services. Part of our concern, and where we are pushing our vendors on IMS is to go beyond the rigorous scope of 3GPP and 3GPP2, but think about how it plays into a full blown network that has a lot of non-IMS applications as well.
Q. Speaking of MCI and its evolution, how has the integration of the two networks gone so far?
A. Verizon telecom, which is coming from Verizon classic, was focused on the retail market offerings for VoIP, and MCI came into the merger with a large embedded base of wholesale VoIP customers, which is something we had not turned our attention to. The net of that is that the resulting combination of Verizon Wireline (VZT) and Verizon Business (VB) is very complimentary. Now we’re really covering the full spectrum of services from retail, residential, up through retail large enterprise as well as the wholesale and third party in the wholesale business. If anything, I think that gives us more motivation to doing a standards-based IMS approach. A single services platform that can be reutilized for different market segments, instead of having to build stovepipes for each market segment.
Q. Do you see the vendors playing the role of professional service integrators in your roll out of IMS?
A. If you’re familiar with the approach that Verizon Wireless is taking, which is partnering to create the framework for the specifications. We have not been quite as extreme in the Verizon Wireline side of the business, although we have taken a similar approach. About a year ago, we added a chapter to the VIF (Verizon Interoperability Forum), which consists of Verizon, our strategic vendors, and some innovative start-up vendors, to deal with interoperability issues and complex issues in the optical space. Last year, we added a chapter for VoIP where we were looking to collaborate with strategic vendors on standardization activities in the areas of NNI and SIP peering. While we have not published a single, large volume that specifies the framework, we have been working on specific-use cases with a number of important VoIP vendors. What comes out of that is that we try to drive toward the appropriate standards, and at the same time it forms the basis of the requirements that we did put in the RFP. So, the participants of VIF are not surprised by our requirements because they helped form those. We would expect this work to go beyond the RFP responses to working together, because we will win or loose this together as an industry and roll out this complex distributed system that’s IMS.
Q. Your wireless brethren, Verizon Wireless, released its A-IMS specification. What’s your take on that and does it affect Verizon?
A.I think it's all of our burden to make sure to that were not confusing the industry that it's different things, but coming together on some language to use here.
Q. With Verizon FiOS going strong, do you see a role for IMS there? What is the role?
A. Absolutely. Some of the low-hanging fruit, which is not necessarily things like caller ID on the TV. Certainly, when it gets to bundling, billing and access to a service, we see integration with IMS as being an important part of our video offering. We are working with ATIS to make sure that IMS, or in particular SIP, is part of the message set to initiate sessions for VoD in IPTV. It’s not that all IPTV rolls under IMS, but something that’s session-oriented, why would not I use the same infrastructure with the same billing and charging capability rather than invent a whole new one for IPTV? And the extension for that which is a natural for Verizon is then to use IMS as the unifying platform to tie it into Verizon Wireless as well. Verizon Wireless has their streaming V-Cast service and it would only make sense that our customers want some content movement between their wireless handset and the living room television that might be powered by FiOS. Getting some unification there can be done any number of ways, but IMS will probably present itself as an efficient mechanism to do that.
Q. One of the concerns carriers are citing is the support for SIP and non-SIP services. How will Verizon address this paltry issue?
A. The support for legacy services is very important for us to do, but the other aspect of that even on the new front there’s a lot of new work on the business side moving elements to Web-based services in a SOAP. SOAP is new and IP, but it’s not IMS. In the business realm, it might include real-time session services such as multimedia conferencing or business transaction capabilities. This presents a challenge because you’re not going to roll one under the other, so all of the Web services don’t become IMS-enabled.
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