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Networks & Infrastructure
C5: Telefonica And France Telecom Cast Doubts On IMS
Lack Of Standards And Devices Threatens Business Case
by Iain Morris
Slow progress on standardization, a lack of terminals, an uncertain business model and unclear economic benefits.
Sounds like a recipe for disaster? They’re actually the less palatable ingredients of IMS – a technology on which many operators are staking their future. And, believe it or not, that unsavory mix was concocted by some of the companies putting IMS at the heart of their propositions.
“To get the industry started we need standardization,” said Kjell Forsberg, director market support for Swedish vendor Ericsson, at the C5 World Forum in Milan this morning, despite representing a vendor involved in more than 300 operator deployments of IMS over the past few years.
The operators, for their part, do not seem to have given much thought to some of the fundamentals.
Sitting on the same panel as Forsberg, Jorge de los Rios, a technology manager for Spanish operator Telefonica, was quick to roll out the usual arguments about new service creation. But he appeared stumped when asked by an audience member about ARPU expectations from those services.
“The customer wants converged services, such as video calls with full interoperability. The strategy is first to get there,” he said in dodging the question.
France Telecom, which also featured on this morning’s panel, has made IMS the cornerstone of its convergence strategy (see France Telecom Drools Over IMS) and is expecting between five and ten percent of its revenues to come from IMS-like services by the end of 2008.
But Noel Foret, the operator’s director of service and network control architecture, admits France Telecom’s IMS ambitions might ultimately be frustrated by inertia on handset development.
“The next generation of services will be driven by IMS devices and we are pushing vendors to deliver these devices,” he says.
An even bleaker assessment of IMS came from analyst group Infonetics Research. Stephane Teral, a principal analyst with the company, highlighted all of the issues mentioned as potentially disruptive, and went so far as saying that ‘vendors are making their own recipes out of IMS’.
“Lots of products are coming from the IT world and being repackaged as pre-IMS,” says Teral.
He sounded particularly concerned about service interoperability, wondering how operators might go about integrating IMS with IPTV platforms deployed in advance.
Both Telefonica and France Telecom recognise the migration to IMS will require organisational change, although France Telecom is more upfront about the progress it has made in this area so far. Last year it created a ‘technocentre’ dedicated to the creation and assessment of new IMS-enabled services, and at the same time it merged its fixed, mobile and internet technical teams into one group technical organization.
Outside that organization, France Telecom is clear about one thing: vendors need to get the wheels moving on standardization now.
“As soon as the end-to-end service is standardised there will be a trigger for mass-market adoption,” says Foret.
More Information:
France Telecom Drools Over IMS
But Urges Vendors to Step Up Supply of Infrastructure and Terminals
BT Pioneers NGN "Open Innovation"
Networks Alone Won't Drive Value, Says CTO
Italtel CEO Eyes Mobile NGN Opportunities
Outlines Ambitious Expansion Plans
MSF To Test IMS/NGN Products
MultiService Forum Expands Responsibilities
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