| There are two camps of service providers who make money off of the residential Internet users today. Camp one is made up of the Googles, Yahoos, and AOLs who are often referred to as “over the top” or WEB 2.0 service providers. This camp doesn’t need IMS, or at least they haven’t shown much interest in IMS. On the other hand, this camp is known for the cool innovative stuff like P2P VoIP (Skype), iTunes, and video PC such as YouTube and more.
Members of the other camp are the legacy, facilities-based wireline, wireless, and cable companies. Regarding IP service, this camp provides Internet broadband access and/or functions as an ISP. The problem with these two services is that they are flat rate and are considered commodities in most markets. For this camp, IMS presents perhaps the only real opportunity to become innovative and profit like the camp one player.
So, what is missing in the Internet architecture that limits facility-based telecom operators from improving their bottom line financially? Or better said, why do they need IMS? First, the Internet was designed for best-effort routing and connectivity. Adopting an IMS architecture over an IP-based infrastructure gives service providers control over what the user is doing. With control, knowing what the user is doing or what they want to do allows the operator to synchronize Quality of Service (QoS) with service provisioning and, equally important, monetizing the transaction. In short, IMS architecture provides a means to provide QoS with compensation.
Second, the camp one portals create value by combining non-telecom services with telecom services or so-called service mash-ups—for example, calling a buddy via VoIP over broadband and delivering a map displayed on a screen that shows where you are calling from. IMS architecture allows a telecom operator to do the same: bundle a nontelecom product with a telephone service (or voice) component.
Finally, today major Tier One telecom operators have many non-interoperable or so-called “smokestack” back-office functions generally referred to as operations and business support systems (OSS/BSS). With IMS architecture, these smokestacks can be reduced to one OSS/BSS, thereby increasing operational efficiency and reducing costs. So in a nutshell, what’s IMS? It’s a vast collection of developed functions and interface standards under one umbrella architecture called IMS. The key to its almost universal acceptance by the telecom standards community is that it reuses already established standards such as Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and DIAMETER. |
