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Carrier Services
IMS an ingredient in SureWest’s VoIP recipe
Carrier selects Alcatel-Lucent technology for class 5 migration
by Jim Barthold
IMS is a now-and-future ingredient in SureWest
Communications’ new Digital Phone VoIP service. It is not,
both SureWest and its vendor, Alcatel-Lucent, emphasize, the
main ingredient.
“Our emphasis is on the VoIP,” said Bill DeMuth, SureWest’
CTO.
The carrier will offer VoIP and its Web-based interfaces as
part of a new bundle of services for its high-speed data and
video broadband customers. Existing traditional voice
customers will be offered VoIP but will not be pushed to
migrate, DeMuth said, although they may join the fold just
because VoIP offers enhanced usability.
“VoIP gives us a few things. It opens more bundles for
features … with some of the Web-based type of interfaces for
voice mail and things like that (and) it helps us with our
broadband customers to bundle things and add new features
onto the packages and provides a great opportunity to
consumers,” he said.
IMS, even in its simplest form, adds to the VoIP possibilities,
said Mike Cooper, vice president of marketing and strategy
for Alcatel-Lucent’s multi-core business division.
“One of the things that we’ve been saying for a long time is
there are a lot of ways to get to IMS, Cooper said. “The most
important thing about IMS is that it creates a service
architecture or framework for blended advanced services as
carriers roll out more applications in the network.”
SureWest, he said, isn’t going whole hog with IMS. It’s
going “through the smaller path of starting with the converged
telephone server (CTS) in a compact IMS mode and then they
can grow that as they see fit in terms of a full IMS when they
want to start adding applications down the road.”
Fixed-mobile convergence might be among those
applications, but both SureWest and Alcatel-Lucent recoiled a
bit at the suggestion that it might happen soon.
“It (IMS) gives us an opportunity to work with other carriers,”
said DeMuth. “We announced the sale of our wireless
company, but we still think wireless is very viable; it’s just not
an area we want to particularly focus on. (IMS) gives us the
ability to at least interface with or partner with wireless
companies.”
Cooper agreed that IMS and FMC are not bread-and-butter.
“The terms FMC and IMS are not synonymous,” he
said. “Fixed-mobile convergence means a lot of different
things to a lot of different people. What’s true about IMS is
that the fixed carriers and the mobile carriers view IMS as the
standard to migrate to in their converged networks.”
For now, SureWest will have the IMS elements in its
equipment as it moves into the VoIP space to “bundle things
and add new features into the packages and provide us the
opportunity to let consumers personalize their services,”
DeMuth concluded.
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