Editorial: IMS: God’s Gift to the Telecoms and Their OSS/BSS Vendors

IP Multimedia Subsystems (IMS) is God’s gift to the telecoms and their OSS/BSS vendors. First: Why in general for the telecoms? Then we’ll name 10 specific target areas for OSS/BSS executives and their vendors.

From a 30,000-foot view, IMS is an architecture that allows the telecoms to achieve three goals.

IP Network Monetizing

First, IMS allows providers to monetize their IP network. Other than broadband access fees and some revenues when telcos act as ISPs, they get nothing, while at Google, Yahoo and others business is booming. Why? IP by itself was designed to route packets and provide connectivity. If this is all a telco does—provide connectivity for Google et al.—it is just providing dumb bit pipe service. If the telecoms want more, they need control of their IP networks. IMS gives them much needed control over their bit pipes.

Services and New Business Opportunities

Next, IMS is the first telecom architecture that seamlessly converges wireline, wireless and IP networks. The obvious benefit is new revenues from presence, gaming, follow-me, “where are my buddies” services and others. But it is more than that. IMS allows the telecoms to unbundle their customers from their network so others can develop services for their customers. This enables other industries to leverage wireline and mobile assets with their product and service offerings (autos, smart home devices and more).

Operational Efficiency

Third, even if new services and business opportunities don’t yield telecoms a dime, gains in operational efficiencies surely will. IMS is the only developed architecture that can eliminate OSS/BSS and operational “smokestacks”—separate provisioning, mediation, rating, billing, assurance and other systems for each voice, data, video and wireless network. Legacy OSS/BSSs were designed for specific services. IMS OSS/BSSs will be designed for all present and future services.

But these godsends for the telecoms won’t mean a thing without a major investment in OSS/BSS—and here’s where the vendors get their own godsend—because telecom cannot monetize IP assets without them. Today’s IP networks offer merely best-effort, flat-rate services. This is the most sensible pricing strategy for dumb-pipe connectivity, and it best aligns with the value delivered to the customer. However, a telecom cannot succeed with new IMS services and business opportunities if it fails to support its customers.

Therefore, having an IMS network in place is only half the battle. The other half is operations and services. OSS/BSS is the basis of good operations and services, and is what will separate the men from the boys going forward.

Lastly, a telecom won’t save a dime in operational efficiency by only removing a smokestack or two. Nothing will be gained until all legacy OSS/BSSs are replaced.

Top 10 OSS/BSS Opportunities

OK, at a 30,000-foot view you can envision an endpoint: an all-IP network based on an IMS architecture that is managed with a single OSS/BSS infrastructure. But what about the transition to IMS? Here are our top 10 OSS/BSS near-term opportunities.

1. IPDR—The IP Detail Record was not created with IMS in mind. But when the IPDR group was born at TeleStrategies’ billing show seven years ago, the requirement was already there for having a usage record that could capture and represent the breadth of services enabled with a multiservice IP core. Today’s legacy call detail records (CDRs)—as well as most OSS/BSSs—were designed for selling time on a pipe (a phone call, connectivity, a VPN). With IMS, a service provider is no longer billing for time or distance, but for applications and/or performance-based media sessions. So if you or your customers have mediation, rating or billing system responsibilities, and you have to prepare for IMS, think IPDR readiness.

2. Home Subscriber Server (HSS)—Probably the most fundamental component in the IMS architecture is the HSS. This is where customers and the network services are associated. This is also where the telecom defines what services a subscriber is authorized to receive. The HSS, therefore, becomes the core component of a next-generation service creation/provisioning platform.

3. Diameter—In addition to getting the HSS up and running, you have to replace the old ISP remote user authentication, authorization and accounting (AAA) protocol known as RADIUS (remote authentication dial-in user service). With Diameter, think twice as good. Diameter is the chosen accounting protocol for IMS. This is a critical OSS/BSS interface, because it is how services will be authorized on a per-use basis (such as with prepaid, advice of charge or other pre-session accounting), as well as how post-session charging will be forwarded to upstream billing systems. For any service provider that wishes to hold its services out on a usage-sensitive basis, Diameter will become a critical OSS/BSS interface. Are your mediation, rating and/or billing systems ready?

4. Call Session Control Function (CSCF)—The CSCF is a key network element introduced by IMS. Essentially, the CSCFs are a network of SIP proxies (originating, interrogating and serving proxies) in which all call (session) signaling messages are propagated. As such, CSCFs interact extensively with the HSS, charging infrastructure (via Diameter), QoS provisioning subsystems and application service infrastructure. Like any core network element, CSCFs must be carefully managed from a security, capacity, fault and performance perspective. Network management systems and service assurance systems must be ready to deal with this new class of network elements in order to provide carrier-grade service levels.

5. Service control interactive module (SCIM)—Every Tier 1 telecom has to have an IMS-based service up and running today to impress the investment and application partner communities. To facilitate fast service rollout and bundling of legacy, SS7-based and current SIP applications, another IMS “box” is needed. It’s called SCIM. Because SCIM can act as a central point for gathering data from multiple application servers, it becomes an IMS NGN version of a mediation device.

6. Presence—The closest thing to an IMS architecture “killer app” is presence. Not only do you know where your subscribers are in your network and their availability on a per-service basis, but you know where they are in someone else’s network. But this asset doesn’t do the bottom line any good unless it can be monetized. Presence is something a service provider can sell. It has value to another carrier. If you plan to leverage presence information and sell it, you will need an OSS/BSS to support it. Otherwise, it will become marginalized and valueless.

7. SIP handsets—A key limiting factor for IMS-designed networks and services is the lack of SIP-based handsets. That will improve as time goes on, and so will a new generation of network management and customer support OSSs. A SIP phone is a general-purpose computer managed by an operating system capable of supporting a wide range of networked-applications, like your home computer. But unlike your home computer, in order to provide reliable service delivery to the handset, service providers will need to be able to look at handset and determine what capabilities it has (its memory, CPU, disk space and more). Next-generation service delivery platforms will have to account for this, as will inventory, network management and service assurance systems.

8. SIP is peer-to-peer—The other revolution SIP devices introduce is peer-to-peer session capabilities between customer devices and service application servers. (By peer-to-peer, we mean that the only thing sitting between the clients and/or servers is an IP network and the IMS signaling infrastructure.) Today’s services on legacy, non-IP networks will be migrated to this new peer-to-peer paradigm. Legacy OSS/BSS will have to migrate (or retire) as well, if the architecture is to be IMS-based. Without an IMS-based OSS/BSS, service providers will be back to, or still stuck in, the “open” Internet, bit-pipe model.

9. Settlements—IMS-designed networks will create a virtual home environment and eliminate the difference between national roaming and home networking. Today’s roaming infrastructure was designed for voice and is not adequate for promised IMS-based application services and peer-to-peer applications (multi-party networked games, remote video monitoring, smart-home applications and beyond). Add to financial clearing and settlements the issue of taxes, new service bundling, end-to-end QoS and security, and you’ll find that a new generation of CABS, service assurance, revenue assurance, content settlement and other OSS/BSSs will be required.

10. Intelligence support systems (ISS)—And not to forget the other support systems, ISS. The service creation power of IMS-architected networks has not been lost on the law enforcement and intelligence communities. If you are a “target” and the presence service knows where you are, what networks you are logged into and your communications profile, law enforcement will want to be able to obtain that information. This is the ultimate target tracking and archiving system. If you can gather subscriber session information from multiple service provider networks and application servers, correlate that data and send it to a billing system, then law enforcement will request this information be sent to a legal-intercept collection and monitoring system. Also, if you can prioritize your calls so a family member can reach you anywhere anytime, law enforcement would likely want to know who has Osama Bin Laden in their buddy list, presence application, and so on.

If you need to better understand the impact of IMS on OSS/BSS, plan to attend Billing and OSS World May 4-6 in Miami Beach. If you need a better understanding of IMS and CALEA compliance, plan to attend ISS World May 22-24 in Washington, D.C. Alternatively, if you need a better understanding of IMS technologies, plan to attend our bi-monthly seminar, Understanding NGN Technologies for Non-Engineers. Go to www.telestrategies.com for agenda details and registration information.