IMS Forum: The Voice of IP Convergence

Dear Fellow IMS Forum Members and Friends:

We at the IMS Forum^®, the industry’s only association dedicated to IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) application and service interoperability and certification, are eagerly looking forward to 2008. We welcome the new year with news that aggressive service providers globally will offer more services and new applications for triple play and quadruple play utilizing IMS architectures. Just read the market forecast provided below by Frost & Sullivan’s Ron Gruia.

Our first Plugfest of 2008, Plugfest IV, whose theme is “IMS Triple Play, OSS/BSS and Billing Applications,” will be held February 25 to 29, 2008, at the UNH InterOp Lab (IOL) in New Hampshire. We will announce the results of this Plugfest on the show floor of the Spring VON.x conference, March 17- 20 in San Jose, CA.

Operations and business support systems and security have become important pieces of the IMS architecture. Business services are growing and becoming a major initiative for all service providers and interoperability will play an increasingly important role in rapid service delivery. IMS is emerging as a framework to carry current and future advanced multimedia, mobility and nomadicity applications over cellular, WiFi, WiMAX, cable, fiber, and power lines.

We have many returning participants to next month’s Plugfest and also new participants such as HP. I hope you will read the responses of HP's Nigel Upton in this month's Member Q&A. Nigel and I talked about the value of Plugfests and interoperability testing at the HP Communications World 2007 conference in Barcelona last month, where I provided the keynote speech.

These conference appearances, where I meet many of the members of our community, are invaluable in surveying the market, getting and providing feedback and renewing acquaintances. In April, IMS Forum Technical Co-Chair Scott Poretsky will lead a half-day workshop consisting of IMS Forum member speakers at the IMS 2.0 World Forum in Paris, France. Read more about the workshop below in our Marketing section. I thank the IMS Forum members who are leading the various sessions with Scott, and the many members who make conference appearances on our behalf throughout the world, throughout the year. You are invaluable in helping to drive the growth of our industry.

In 2008 IMS will continue to evolve as the only pervasive Service Providers architecture for quadruple play including voice, video, Web 2.0 and user mobility. As always, the IMS Forum is here to continue its interoperability testing with Plugfests and to enhance its working group initiatives both in marketing and in the development of state-of-the-art, technical guidelines for service deployment that emphasize return-on-investment.

Best wishes for a happy and productive new year!

Michael Khalilian
Chairman & President IMS Forum
"The Voice of IP Convergence"
MKhalilian(at)IMSForum.org

by Ronald Gruia, Program Leader and Principal Analyst, Frost & Sullivan; Ron covers emerging communications solutions. He can be reached at rgruia@frost.com.

IMS in 2007

While the migration to IMS appears to be in the cards, the exact time frame of adoption by most service providers is not clear. There has been progress on the standardization front, with initiatives by bodies such as the 3GPP/3GPP2, ETSI Tispan and efforts such as A-IMS and interoperability testing by the IMS Forum and other industry forums. However, the market development has occurred at a slower pace than originally anticipated. The reasons for this slower uptake are manifold:

Service providers are still adjusting to the business case – in a Frost & Sullivan survey conducted earlier this year¹, roughly 33 percent of operators raised questions about the value proposition and sales pitch of IMS

• Operators are still coping with how they should migrate their networks and services to IMS
• IMS standardization efforts are ongoing, therefore service providers believe that it is better to wait until things become more settled
• Other "high rider" caveats mentioned included the lack of openness of IMS (i.e. the proprietary nature of some of the solutions available in today's marketplace) and the need for more interoperability testing

Service providers are realizing that the move to IMS will be a gradual transition over time, entailing the interplay of different network applications, technologies and protocols as the networks evolve. In order to achieve success in the prevalent complex and highly competitive environment, they need to comprehend how the evolution of their networks will affect their business, and more importantly, what is the best transitional path to follow. In addition, the carrier emphasis is being placed on operational expense (OPEX) savings and not necessarily on service capability, which echoes a similar message from Stu Elby (Verizon VP of Network Architecture).

Some carriers such as Telemar (Brazilian operator and the largest wireline carrier in South America) are taking a more gradual and pragmatic evolution, choosing to deploy services that can be accessed by subscribers regardless of whether they are being served by next generation network (NGN) or legacy infrastructure. Delmar’s pre-IMS approach enables the company to separate the timing of investments in NGN/IMS access layer infrastructure from the timing of introduction of new services.

The majority of carriers that have chosen IMS are integrated operators with wireline and wireless networks. Not surprisingly, they typically elected to go along the fixed path to launch their initial IMS applications (such as IP Centrex at TDC in Denmark and residential telephony with Telephonic in Spain). Why the emphasis on wireline services? Because they are on the fixed side, these operators do not have the same obstacles as those on the mobile side (namely bandwidth, quality of service and handset availability). As far as wireline IMS applications go, the enterprise will play a significant role in the future, with more rollouts of IP Centrex (hosted IP telephony).

Outlook for 2008

While the IMS acronym might have not been as widely used this year as it was in 2006, a closer look reveals that in fact there have been many positive indicators that suggest that the adoption of the technology is under way. Perhaps the smaller number of press releases containing the IMS buzzword is more of a hint that the technology has already passed through the first peak on its hype cycle and is now undergoing further refinements prior to becoming more widely deployed. There is a number of IMS RFP decisions that we expect will be announced in 2008, including, among others:

• China Mobile: decision expected in the second half of the year and the size of the deal is rumored to be in the US$ 200-400 million range
• Comcast: decision expected sometime in the first semester, and competition will be between NSN, Ericsson, Nortel and Alcatel-Lucent
• France Telecom/Orange: while the timing of the announcement is still unknown (the results of the RFP were expected to be disclosed in Q4 2007), we believe that that players such as Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, NSN and ZTE are still in the running. On the other hand, there are indications that FT may take a multi-step approach to IMS, by first moving to a VoIP architecture (which we think must be SIP based to transition to IMS)
• T-Mobile USA: decision rumored to be in the first half of the year, with players such as Alcatel-Lucent, NSN and Nortel in the running
• Verizon: the timing of the announcement is still to be determined; however, there are rumors that this will be a close battle between Alcatel-Lucent and NSN
• Besides the above tenders, Chunghwa Telecom just announced the NSN (Nokia Siemens Networks) as the winner of its own IMS RFP in early December 2007, a deal worth about 21 million Euros

In conclusion, operators will start capping their investments in current technologies and gradually begin to shift them to new equipment purchases. As they embark on their IMS migrations, there will be several paths open to them, including evolutions starting from the softswitch, signaling layer or service mediation (an incremental build-out starting from the SCIM component in the IMS architecture).

[1] Please refer to “IMS – Ready for Prime Time?” by Ronald Gruia, released by Frost & Sullivan in February 2007Copyright: Frost & Sullivan, used with permission by the IMS Forum

 

Q & A with Nigel Upton, BSS Products General Manager, HP

What IMS services and products does Hewlett-Packard offer?

My role is to manage HP’s BSS products within HP’s Communications, Media and Entertainment (CME) vertical. I have the portfolio of BSS products which includes mediation and real-time charging, data retention for compliance, and business intelligence, revenue assurance and fraud management. We have been doing a lot of work in the BSS space with real-time charging, and its impact for billing vendors. So, we are very interested in the OSS/BSS focus of the IMS Plugfests, particularly the upcoming Plugfest IV.

What are some of the key obstacles that service providers face in implementing IMS?

Our customers are always asking us, ‘What will IMS do for us?’ They understand the principles behind it – the ability to have a flexible architecture that allows them to use best-of-breed technology, to introduce new services really quickly, and to do promotions and change pricing on the fly. That’s what they want to do. They regard IMS as a path to get there, but they also have huge network environments that are extremely complex. They want to know how to move from what they have today to where they can be IMS compliant and receive all of those benefits.

At HP we engineer our products with these requirements in mind. So when we provide technology to our customers, we are not providing them a complete end-to-end solution based on all HP intellectual property. We pull in partners with best-in-class technology. For example, we don’t provide billing ourselves, we partner with billing companies like Amdocs. We work with all the network equipment providers who are providing switches. We do not believe that one network equipment provider or billing vendor should provide everything from the billing all the way through to the switch. HP provides the mediation and real-time charging platforms in the middle that allow the billing systems and switches to be added in according to whichever vendor is found to be best for the job at hand.

How can the IMS Forum’s Plugfest benefit HP and your customers

Customers need a flexible architecture that utilizes best-of-breed components but things have to work together, and they have to work in an existing environment. That is where the Plugfests come in. IMS is required for real-time charging. All of the elements and applications have to work together, and they have to work in an existing environment. The IMS Plugfests give us an opportunity to demonstrate and prove this.

Who are some of HP’s customers and what IMS services are they deploying?

To give you a sense of scale, we have about 150 mediation customers and roughly 20 percent are now deploying real-time charging on our HP Internet Usage Manager (IUM) platform. We have just gone live with a commercial deployment to around two million mobile users with China Telecom. They went through a year-long process to test components with a number of vendors. We were one of four or five tested, passed the certification and are the only vendor currently deployed.

Our global customers include Vodafone Spain in Europe. In Asia Pacific, we have a number of new mobile providers in India and elsewhere throughout the region. In the Americas, we have substantial presence in multiple properties of America Movies Corporation as well as leading cable and wireless providers. We also have a large number of big installs in Russia including MTS. The technology used on the mobile side in Russia is amazing. We see a lot of prepaid services being initially deployed on IMS in emerging markets. Prepaid is very popular in emerging markets and, in many cases, emerging markets have less legacy to deal with, making it much easier to roll out newer technology that enables real-time charging.

Real-time charging has been driving the requirement for IMS. It is important for prepaid because charging must occur in real-time, and keep a running balance. For example, when someone buys a $20 prepaid card, you have to know when the customer is coming close to $19.99 in order to stop the service. Real-time charging must be layered on top of the more traditional batch mediation, to make legacy systems and newer systems all work together. We use the Diameter protocol, which is part of the IMS environment. This enables us to build on our software strengths, and we can partner with providers of billing, rating and balance engines to offer best-of-breed services.

We are seeing these very advanced services taking off outside of the US. In Europe, everyone is soccer-mad and they want the replay of the latest goal scores sent to their cell phones. Consumer demands like this make charging in real time necessary for these new services, and gives customers control over their spending which should drive the uptake of these services. At the same time, real-time charging gives service providers credit control, so they can harvest all the revenue from these new services.

What IMS products have you released to date?

We have been focusing on IMS compliance since 2006. We released the latest version of the product, HP IUM 5.0 at the beginning of 2007. We have just released new performance benchmarks, and we continue to evolve the technology by developing faster hardware and cost-effective software.

For example, High deal, a pricing and rating solutions provider, and HP IUM have just announced new breakthroughs in online charging. We are able to deliver huge performance gains at a fraction of the current costs. In tests conducted at the HP Solutions Center in Richardson, Texas, the combined High deal-HP IUM solution delivered four times higher throughput and half the latency of any other published benchmark. The combined High deal and HP systems performed charging control, rating and balance update operations with end-to-end transaction rates of 24,000 transactions per second (TPS) for session-based charging with an average latency of 23 milliseconds per transaction. In an event charging scenario for messaging services, throughput climbed to 49,000 TPS with average latency of 8 milliseconds.

Our combined online charging system (OCS) solution drives down the cost of new service rollouts today, and provides an open, future-proof platform for high transaction-volume processing – exactly what our customers have asked for as they deploy IMS-compliant service delivery platforms. Approximately 30 of our customers are currently working on deploying IMS-compliant architectures around real-time billing.

What are some of the key factors for IMS success in the industry?

Deployments have started and that is good news. Leadership, continued investment, testing and certification are all needed. HP is in a good space with respect to this, and we have the confidence to move forward step by step.

It will take continual investment of the vendors and continual proof of real-world success to move the industry forward. HP develops the best-in-breed platforms for IMS-based B/OSS and billing, and then we develop an end-to-end view by pulling in partners to fill in all the gaps. Single vendor, end-to-end solutions are often proprietary and therefore not IMS-compliant which means it is much more difficult to swap components and bring in new best-in-class technology.

Customers are telling us that they are sick and tired of paying huge amounts of money to vendors who are building proprietary systems for them. They want to be able to move to more of a plug and play, best-of-breed IMS-based architecture that works with their legacy systems. The key to success is giving them real world examples of how this works so they can have the confidence to start migrating step by step into an IMS architecture. If you mention fork lift upgrades, they will run a mile.

To have your company considered for a profile in the Q & A section of this newsletter contact the newsletter editor.

Technical Working Group Plans for Plugfest IV

The last two months of the year were very busy with the IMS Forum Technical Working Group. Manuel Vexler, Chair of the Technical WG chaired the first day of Telecom Signaling World Forum, in London. He also presented on behalf of the IMS Forum “Managing The Signalling Services Enabled In IMS Networks” Other Forum members presenting at the conference and the post-conference seminars included Jeri Kuhn, and Robby Benedict, both from Tekelec.

Manuel also was the keynote speaker at the Radvision IMS Express day in Tel-Aviv, which involved over 40 local companies and more than 160 participants. In December, IMS Forum, Next Point and Mavenir took part in the Base Station and Femtocell conferences in Dallas.

At the conference, Peter Landry from Current Analysis publicly acknowledged the IMS Forum Plugfest interoperability event as the best interoperability in the industry.

We are excited about the upcoming Plugfest IV to take place between February 25-29, 2008.

The theme of Plugfest IV is "IMS Triple Play, OSS/BSS and Billing Applications." In Plugfest IV IMS Forum members will test the interoperability of IMS applications and operational systems over a unified IMS network. These applications and operations and business support systems (OSS/BSS) are available to all types of service providers including wireless, wireline and cable companies. A complete portfolio of services to be tested is being defined by the IMS Forum Interoperability and Testing Working Group. It will include voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) services for consumer and enterprise users, various types of video services, fixed-mobile converged (FMC) services including support of femtocell, unified communications (UC) and interworking with IMS and (OSS/BSS).To date, the confirmed list of Plugfest IV participants include: Aricent - Acision - Alpha Networks - Data Connection Ltd - Empirix - HP - Amdocs - Mavenir Systems - Mu Security - NextPoint Networks- Radvision - Sonus Networks - Starent Networks - Tekelec - Shenick Network Systems – IPgallery

More detail on Plugfest IV can be found on our Web site.

New IMS White Papers Now Available (member only access)Two new white papers can now be found on our Web site under White Papers. They are:

· Rich Multimedia Applications on an IMS Framework

· Prack Method And Usage: The Role Of Prack In IMS

The first white paper, Rich Multimedia Applications on an IMS Framework, acknowledges that innovative IMS services will be the key motivator for operators to implement IMS infrastructure. Sponsored Call and Video Ring Back Tone (V-RBT) services described in this paper are services that can’t easily be offered over legacy cellular network and hence require IMS. Furthermore, these services bring fresh revenue streams and new business value chain models to operators. Both services are implemented over IMS protocols, and have been widely tested with many vendor components at the IMS Forum Plugfest events.

This paper describes the implementation of advertising revenue-generating multimedia applications leveraging the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) infrastructure. While such applications would typically run on mobile handsets of 3G networks, they can be made available to users of 2G mobile networks or PC users of wireline and cable networks without altering the architecture of the service layer. The convergence layer from IP to GSM or fixed networks sets the foundation to seamlessly run services on multiple networks and clients. IMS services can be rolled out without needing to wait for a full deployment of IMS. This paper focuses on “sponsored call” and “video Ring Back Tone” services for illustrative purposes. Other services or variants of these applications can be derived easily.

The second white paper focuses on the PRACK (Provisional Response ACKnowledgement) method. In SIP, provisional responses are typically not sent reliably;[1] however, with the use of PRACK, as specified in RFC 3262 and adopted by the 3GPP, these responses can be sent reliably to ensure efficiency and success of SIP session establishments. PRACK procedures described in SIP specifications have been unclear, and SIP vendors implemented them differently. As a result, a number of PRACK interoperability issues have surfaced. This paper provides a detailed explanation of the PRACK method and a call flow example in an effort to clarify ambiguity within SIP 1xx reliable response specifications, and offers guidance for a PRACK implementation.

The intention of these white papers is to make technical information readily accessible to service providers and vendors. A number of member companies are contributing to the white paper program including Argela, Mascon Global, Mu Security, Encore, NextPoint and others.

The committee is working on its final review of Sponsored Call Applications and Secure Mobile Communications with IMS AKA Signaling. Other important titles are in the pipeline.

Any person or company interested in contributing to an original white paper should contact Scott Poretsky at technicalchair(at)imsforum.org.

Marketing Working Group

The IMS Forum gratefully acknowledges Intel as the first to announce its Platinum sponsorship for Plugfest IV. We also welcome back IMS Magazine and Pulvermedia Inc. as media sponsors.

Nigel Upton, BSS Products General Manager, HP Communications, Media & Entertainment, and Michael Khalilian, Chairman and President, IMS Forum, attending HP Communications World 2007 in Barcelona

Ghada Hanna, Billing and Interconnect Manager, Umniah Telecom, Jordan; Michael Khalilian, Chairman and President, IMS Forum; and Carol Singh, Worldwide Solutions Marketing, Communication, Media & Entertainment, HP, attending HP Communications World 2007 in Barcelona

We are pleased to note that the IMS Forum has recently participated in the following industry events:

• Nov. 5 - 8: Telecoms Signaling World Forum, Central London, UK
  • Manuel Vexler, IMS Forum, "Managing The Signaling Services That Are Enabled In IMS Networks"
  • Jiri Kuthan, Tekelec, "Tekelec Case Study: Understanding How To Deliver Effective Automated VoIP Services In Signaling Networks"
  • Robby Benedyk and Jiri Kuthan, Tekelec, post-conference workshop,"Network Evolution - A Signaling Perspective"
• Nov. 8: IMS Express by Radvision - Tel-Aviv
  • Manuel Vexler opened the day with the IMS Forum keynote
• Nov. 7: IMS MMD Show, Dallas TX
• Nov. 27 - 29, 2007: HP Communications World 2007, Barcelona, Spain
  • Michael Khalilian of IMS Forum provided the keynote address on Nov. 28
• Dec. 3 - 7, 2007: IMS Global Congress 2007, Amsterdam
  • Dan Bantukul, Tekelec, presented, "Optimizing the Migration to IMS from Both the Operator's and the Customer's Perspective"
• Dec. 3 - 4, 2007: 6th International Basestation Conference, Dallas
  • Manuel Vexler, VP and Co-Chair of the Technical Working Group, IMS Forum, presented "What will be the Consumer Experience of FMC beyond the Home and Hot Spots?" on Dec. 4

The IMS Forum’s active pace of speaking at and participating in several upcoming industry events worldwide continues.

• Jan. 21 - 22: IPTelco World, London
  • Scott Poretsky (Next Point) will participate in a round table discussion on "IMS Applications and Services" on Jan. 21
• Jan. 23 - 25: Internet Telephony Conference & Expo, Miami
  • Michael Khalilian will chair a round table discussion, "IP Contact Center State of the Market" on Jan. 24, 2:15pm
  • Manuel Vexler to moderate "SIP Trunking for the SMB" on Jan.24 at 9:00am
• March 17- 20: Spring VON.x, San Jose, CA
  • Plugfest IV participants and the IMS Forum will announce results from Plugfest IV
• Apr. 1 -3: CTIA Wireless 2008, Las Vegas Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada
• Apr. 22 - 24: IMS 2.0 World Forum, Convention Centre, Paris, France
  • Pre-conference workshop, led by Scott Poretsky, on Apr. 21, 10:30 a.m. - 6:30 p.m., on "Policy Decision and Enforcement to Deliver IMS Services"
  • This workshop has generated a lot of interest in the industry! It will provide an overview of IMS services and service blending, the policies required to enforce delivery of those services, and the policy-making and delivery process in IMS. Policies for security, quality of service (QoS), mobility, and charging will be addressed. Each of the IMS core network components involved in the policy enforcement and delivery process will be discussed so that network operators can make best-of-breed decisions in a fully interoperable network. Application of the IMS policy framework to build Pre-IMS (also referred to as IMS-Lite or IMS-Like) networks will also be discussed.
  • Session presenters include: Ron Gruia, Frost and Sullivan; Hila Dahan, IP Gallery; Anantha Ramu, Acision; Adi Paz, Radvision; John DiPietro, Starent Networks; Bruce Perlmutter, Sonus Networks; Travis Russell, Tekelec; Kushanava Laha, Aricent; Deepak Wadhwa, Continuous Computing; Ranjith Mukundan, Wipro; Jerome Sicard, Hewlett-Packard; Brian Foskett, Mavenir
  • Round table discussion, with Scott Poretsky, on Apr. 23 on the "Industry Debate on Standardization Activities to Support Interoperability and Integration"
  • Panel discussion, with Scott Poretsky, on Apr. 23, "Is there Enough Coordination between the Various Standardization Bodies? How Can Cooperation Improve?"
  • Keynote session on Apr. 24, "Exploring the Imperative to Invest in NGNs and Challenging Perceptions About the Extent to Which IMS is Central to NGN Architecture Strategies"
• May 13 - 15, 2008: ISPCON, Chicago, IL
• May 13 - 15: Informa Telecoms and Media IMS Asia 2008, Singapore, Speaker TBD
• May 18 - 20, NCTA Cable Show ‘08, New Orleans
• May 18 -22: TM Forum Management World 2008, Acropolis Congress and Exposition Center, Nice, France
• Jun. 16 - 19: NXTcomm, Las Vegas, Nevada (IMSF member meetings & election)
• Sep. 9 - 12: Internet Telephony Fall, Los Angeles, CA
• Sep. 10 - 12: CTIA Wireless IT and Entertainment , San Francisco
• Sep. 30 - Oct. 2: WiMAX World Series, Chicago, IL
• Oct. 21 - 23: Mobile Internet World, Boston, MA
• Oct. 27 - 30: Fall VON, Boston, MA
• Nov. 10 - 13: TelcoTV, Anaheim Convention Center, Orange County, Calif.

Spring VON.X 2008, March 17 - 20, will focus on the cutting edge applications and technologies that are driving the market in next generation VoIP, wireless, video and data services. VON.X includes a comprehensive conference program alongside the VON Expo, a 225+ company Exhibit Hall featuring all of the industry's leading companies providing Internet Communications products, services and solutions. As a member of the IMS Forum you are entitled to attend The VON Expo free of charge. Register online at www.springvonx.com/register and enter priority code IMS. You must be pre-registered by March 16 to redeem this offer. Register here , select the Expo Only option and enter priority code IMSEM to redeem this offer.

GET REAL about your business at ISPCON: The Internet Industry Event!
ISPCON is where the service provider industry goes to GET REAL about the future of their businesses. Isn't it time you increase ARPU? Pump up profits? Optimize your operations? Find out what's next? Whatever your plans, ISPCON will help you GET REAL about them. This is the industry's only forum where peers learn from peers in real one-on-one discussion about what works, what doesn't and what's next. To access the IMS Forum member discount use Customer Code FISPAF7 at http://www.ispcon.com/

The IMS Forum's mission is to accelerate the interoperability of IMS applications and services, enabling enterprise and residential consumers to quickly benefit from the delivery of quadruple play voice, video, Internet and mobile services over broadband via cable, mobile and fixed networks.

IMS applications and services comprise residential VoIP, entertainment including IPTV and gaming, IP Centrex / IP PBX and unified communications for business including fixed-mobile converged services, videoconferencing and web-collaboration. IMS networks include DSL, Cable, GSM, UMTS, Wi-Fi and WiMAX implementations.

The IMS Forum Plugfests, typically held every 3 to 4 months, bring together dozens of industry-leading IMS vendors from around the world, all of whom build real, full-featured, IMS networks during the test event.

If you are interested in joining the IMS Forum, Plugfests or in participating in any of the working groups or marketing programs, please contact the IMS Forum.

All are invited to participate in the industry's first open IMS Community where Forum members, those involved in various IMS working groups, the IMS LinkedIn group, and our industry colleagues around the world can participate in active, mutually beneficial discussions. Take a moment to register now.

Members are leading and shaping the future of IMS. Joining the IMS Forum enables members to:

• Verify and certify interoperability, reduce costs and accelerate time to market
• Participate in technical working groups focusing on service creation and applications for IMS architecture framework as well as IMS deployment issues
• Gain additional visibility through the IMS Forum's Speakers Bureau, public relations and marketing programs
• Showcase member companies at major telecom, cable, and wireless events in North America, Asia, and Europe
• Receive current market and technology information through newsletters, reports, white papers and conferences
• Gain access to an informed professional network of industry consultants and accredited experts

We welcome your feedback on this newsletter.
IMS Forum Press & Newsletter Contact: pr@imsforum.org