By Manuel Vexler, IMS Forum

Recently, IMS joined a list of “misused” standards which, under the effect of market forces, changed direction by 180 degrees. These standards were originally intended for other applications, however they found their mass market appeal in other directions than the one originally intended by their creators.

IMS is not the first and for sure not the last case where standards are designed for one application, just to find that they are used for another.

As examples, let's start with the Ethernet, which at 10MB/s was running at a hard-to-imagine speed when modems were still running at a few KB/s. Of course, it was destined to be a LAN working over very short distances. Ethernet is now known as a 10/100 GB Ethernet point-to-point connection and can run thousands of miles on a fiber optic cable. Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) started as a peer-to-peer (P2P) music download standard, just to morph into a signaling standard used in IMS. And finally, IMS started life as a mobile broadband standard and is now used as a replacement for ... you guessed, softswitches. Used for VoIP delivery, the softswitches are used in both fixed and mobile networks to deliver a single, narrowband service.

IMS, however, will see at least one more turn as market forces will push convergence and multimedia in telecom networks worldwide. The writing is on the wall. Many service providers and in some cases regulators, are busy combining fixed and mobile voice business units in converged organizations. That will make the introduction of IMS easier and faster as it simplifies both the business case and maximizes the OPEX savings. It also forces the regulators to reconsider basic things such as the definition of a voice call — since for now TDM calls, cellular calls and VoIP calls are regulated separately.

The change to IMS also is helped (sadly) by the economic crisis, as companies have less financial means to keep competing point solutions in operation; for example, VoIP and PSTN fixed line are being delivered on multiple non-IMS platforms. With major and mid-sized service providers entering into new markets such as video delivery and content delivery, there is still a question why the IMS business case is still made on softswitch replacement. Maybe we should wait for a couple of more years so LTE will finally provide a competitive amount of wireless bandwidth (when compared with 3G) and demand the level of quality-of-service required by new interactive media.

Also, for a final comparison, let's go back to the Ethernet model, and talk about the mutation of standards – that is when a standard jumps from one transport medium to another. After all, Ethernet is closely related to the WiFi and WiMAX architectures. So how will IMS mutate?

Manuel Vexler is chair of the technical working group in the IMS Forum. He is well known for his expertise in voice and multimedia over Internet, bringing more than 20 years of experience to roles such as the CTO of CopperCom and vice president of IMS Interoperability at the IMS Forum. He drove M&A at Cisco, and launched new technologies at CopperCom, AMD, Alcatel (Newbridge) and Nortel.