Why Wait for IMS?

Many engineers are perfectionists who see their current projects as hopelessly compromised and flawed, compared with their intentions. The perfectionist knows all the things that could be better if only given time, money and resources. Today, we see service providers embracing this attitude, as they wait for IMS to change the world.

But reality tends to favor working with what we have and making the best of it. From this perspective, the important question is, why wait? Web services and intelligent networks may not be perfect, but they can do much more today than we ask. Flexible billing and charging, which often jammed up new products in the past, are actually available and deployable. Network-agnostic service management—often promised, rarely deployed—has also come of age. In short, many of the critical tools that can enable rich, sophisticated new services are already in large-scale commercial use and can do many of the things service providers seem content to wait for IMS to deliver.

Newcomers Innovate
Incumbents tend to be satisfied with the status quo, so their challengers are the ones to innovate. Some MVNOs provide textbook examples of disrupting markets through innovation. Virgin Mobile (USA), for instance, more or less introduced prepaid to the U.S. market. It has since revolutionized the payment world again with its ad-sponsored Sugar Mama mobile usage.

Disney Mobile, another industry outsider, has made mobile service “family friendly” with parental controls, content controls, usage limits—or allowances—and a range of other services. Each of these companies has changed its market, but neither has an IMS network.

That’s not to say IMS won’t be extremely useful. It’s an elegant, layered architecture that implements crucial concepts like shared data, and media and network independence. It should help make innovation easier, faster and cheaper. But the services that Virgin Mobile and Disney Mobile offer are reminiscent of what IMS promises. They rely on common or shared user data. They apply user-specific policies to execute real-time call and session control. And they charge dynamically in real time based on usage history, context and content. Plus, in the best tradition of old-time stock car racers, they “run what they brung”—and use today’s IS-41 and IS-771 protocols, as well as web services, to do it. Their customers don’t mind.

Similar stories can be found from converged operators in Brazil to hypercompetitive mobile operators in India. In these growing markets, innovators are grabbing market share and expanding their offerings now. They all plan to adopt IMS when ready, but they understand that they can offer similar service innovations today to the more than 1 billion telephone users, more than 1 billion Internet users, and more than 2 billion mobile users on existing networks. That’s where the bulk of the money and opportunity is and will be for years.

Separating Customers from Technology
Companies like Google, Yahoo and Disney Mobile seek to separate customers from technology and concentrate on delivering engaging services. MyGoogle, MyYahoo, MySpace, YouTube and countless others have demonstrated that consumers appreciate personalized, interactive service environments. They’ve also sparked changes in how services are monetized with various ad supported models the traditional operators now see they must embrace.

Technology labels are limiting because they say, “You can’t satisfy these market needs unless you have already implemented technology X.” But plenty of policy, personalization and multimedia capabilities can be delivered today using 2G, web services and other widespread technologies. The idea is to provide a rich and open environment that can deliver services using whatever combination of technologies or protocols comes into play, be it SIP, Diameter, GSM, WIN, INAP, ANSI, web services or anything else.

Telcordia has already worked with customers who are delivering next-generation services over current-generation networks. When they are ready for IMS, they will already have a number of integrated services running, and then they can begin to take advantage of the added capabilities that a true IMS environment will offer. They’ll also have more experience launching and supporting more complex offerings that IMS should help accelerate.

Since traditional fixed, broadband and mobile operators have so much going for them in terms of quality, ubiquitous service and customer outreach, they are in an excellent position to leverage existing assets to deliver more innovative services now. The most compelling reason for them to push forward is that their new competitors are doing so—and learning and growing as a result of focusing on services, rather than waiting for technology.