CHICAGO -- Virtually all of the major telecom equipment vendors will have plenty to strut at this week’s NXTcomm conference here.

The wares will cover a range of hot markets: IMS, for fixed/mobile convergence services; IPTV, for interactive consumer video; and Carrier Ethernet, for next-generation private line and VPN business services.

The IMS Forum, a consortium of vendors including HP, Sonus and UTStarcom, will release the results of its recent Plugfest II at the University of New Hampshire’s interoperability lab. Plugfest is designed to scrutinize interoperability of IMS services and applications, such as VoIP, IP Centrex, SMS and fixed-mobile convergence, from as many as 50 vendors.

Ericsson will show off its IMS Multimedia Telephony (IMT) technology, which is designed as a next-generation Centrex replacement for businesses. It’s also designed to bring multimedia telephony, presence and instant messaging services for residences.

When Alcatel-Lucent officials aren’t participating in panels like “Deploying IMS – Challenges and Lessons Learned,” or “Launch Strategies for IMS Services,” they’ll be demonstrating products that can interwork IMS with IPTV. Such advances are intended to enable any screen/any time interactive video, as an example.

Alcatel-Lucent will also announce the 5650 Control Plane Assurance Manager, which is designed to provide fault prevention, monitoring and troubleshooting for routing-related problems. It works with Alcatel-Lucent’s 5620 Service Aware Manager for IP/MPLS networks.

Tuned in to IPTV

Also in IPTV, UTStarcom is game to show U.S. service providers how it’s done by demonstrating its RollingStream IPTV system. RollingStream serves more than 500,000 subscribers through deployments at China Netcom, China Telecom, MTNL and other service providers in Asia-Pacific, India, Latin America and Europe, UTStarcomm says.

In China alone, RollingStream is installed in 60% of all IPTV deployments serving 80% of the country’s subscribers, UTStarcomm claims.

Optical players such as Adva Optical Networking's and Infinera will also jump on the IPTV and IMS bandwagons at the show. Adva will demonstrate how its 40Gbps Optical Ethernet strategy plays in IPTV environments; and Infinera will unveil its new 40Gbps module and operating system release for its DTN system than can foster an abstraction layer between services like IMS and IPTV and transport. It does this through compatibility and support for 10Gpbs and or lower-speed services.