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Carrier Services
NTCA Fall Conference: The Benefits of IMS
IMS Can Bolster Rural Operators' IP Service Offerings
by Jim Barthold
Although IMS will benefit rural telephone companies
differently – and probably less so from an economic
standpoint -- than their larger carrier brethren, they should
still put the network architecture in place as quickly as
possible to get ahead of the competition, members of the
National Telecommunications Cooperative Association (NTCA)
were told during a panel session of the organization’s Fall
Conference in Philadelphia.
Manuel Vexler, CTO of CopperCom, speaking at the
session “IMS – IP Multimedia Subsystem Implications for
Customer Acquisitions,” said IMS must follow the “necessary
step” of system-wide IP implementation opens up carriers’
networks to over-the-top IP services like Vonage and Skype.
“IP changes everything,” he said during the panel. “This is
really what IMS is trying to solve.”
Rural telcos, he said, can use the IMS architecture to deliver
location-based personal services that they can “route by
presence.” They can also offer “Centrex services to an
individual level.” They should not expect that IMS will provide
instant cost savings by converging siloed operations; that’s
the model for the bigger carriers where “IMS drives fixed-
mobile convergence” and “how they combine all these
networks quickly, efficiently.”
“In the rural setting, IMS follows broadband because it’s IP,”
he said. It “gives you an advantage because of your size … to
roll out new services” to IP customers to offset a flood of new
opportunities from over-the-top providers because “anybody
can connect to that [IP].”
While Vexler and his fellow panelists recognized the benefits
that IMS brings to the IP-based telco operator, they also
noted that the term and the architecture are still being
defined.
“You ask 10 people what IMS is and you’re going to get 10
different answers,” said A. Bernardin Arnason, a principal with
the Pivot Group. “Skeptics will say it’s a solution looking for a
problem.”
Arnason said he sees IMS as a way to deliver “content
anywhere, anytime and on any device I, as a consumer,
choose.” IMS, he said, is “really about this convergence of
services.”
IMS more resembles the PSTN than the Internet, said David
Cleary, vice president of advanced technology at Calix, who
mocked its “unlikely sounding name that really doesn’t tell
you much of what it is.”
IMS, he said, is “really a hybrid between the PSTN and the
Internet” because it has quality control and SIP in place
modeling the PSTN’s SS7 and far above any controls the best-
effort Internet provides. Like the Internet, however, IMS is IP-
based, just “much, much more rigid than the standard
Internet we’re used to,” he said. “From a QoS perspective,
IMS is starting to have the look and feel of the next-
generation PSTN. IMS is designed to mimic all the things we
had in the PSTN but couldn’t get with the Internet.”
It is, concluded Vexler, “not a service cookbook … IMS is a
network architecture; it doesn’t necessarily tell you how to run
your business.”
That, said Vexler, is up to the rural operators who must
understand a truism of the IP age: “We cannot on a going-
forward basis think of our customers as just subscribers”
because subscribers “buy just one service.”
Telco customers going forward have access to a number of
services and “do not have to come back to your for anything
more than just connectivity,” Vexler said, reinforcing his
argument that IMS gives those operators a way to get ahead
of that curve and offer the services those customers want.
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