AT&T offers 'Caller ID on TV' app

Feature enabled by IP Multimedia Subsystem architecture and Microsoft-supplied software

VoIP, unified messaging, products and services

AT&T announced earlier this month that it has added an on-screen "Caller ID on TV" application that displays U-verse Voice caller ID and voice mail notifications on the U-verse TV screen, offering the application to customers at no extra charge. By itself, the feature isn't particularly innovative -- especially since Cablevision, Comcast, Cox and Time Warner Cable already provide a similar service to their users. What is noteworthy from a convergence perspective is that underlying infrastructure enabling the on-screen caller ID feature uses an IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) architecture and the Microsoft-supplied software that drives the U-verse set-top box.

IMS is designed to integrate multimedia features and session control more easily; therefore, this feature integration is likely one of many more to come that capitalize on IMS strengths. AT&T's U-verse Voice is the first mass-market service in the United States to use IMS -- a story we first covered in January 2008.

Ma Bell's 25-year odyssey 

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AT&T announced earlier this month that it has added an on-screen "Caller ID on TV" application that displays U-verse Voice caller ID and voice mail notifications on the U-verse TV screen, offering the application to customers at no extra charge. By itself, the feature isn't particularly innovative -- especially since Cablevision, Comcast, Cox and Time Warner Cable already provide a similar service to their users. What is noteworthy from a convergence perspective is that underlying infrastructure enabling the on-screen caller ID feature uses an IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) architecture and the Microsoft-supplied software that drives the U-verse set-top box.

IMS is designed to integrate multimedia features and session control more easily; therefore, this feature integration is likely one of many more to come that capitalize on IMS strengths. AT&T's U-verse Voice is the first mass-market service in the United States to use IMS -- a story we first covered in January 2008.

Ma Bell's 25-year odyssey 

Over 60% of AT&T customers who buy AT&T's U-verse TV also attach U- verse voice services, and the company added more than 631,000 U-verse Voice customers on an annual basis as of Q3 2009. (U-verse voice growth bucks the trend for AT&T's Q3 2009 year-to-date net loss of over 2.7 million residential voice lines across all wireline voice service categories including primary and secondary TDM voice lines.)

What is also noteworthy is that IMS remains the future standard  for planned session control of multiple services across the both wired and wireless networks. For example earlier this month AT&T, Orange, Telefonica, TeliaSonera, Verizon, Vodafone, Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Nokia Siemens Networks, Nokia, Samsung Electronics and Sony Ericsson introduced a "technical profile" for the "One Voice Initiative" supporting IMS as the preferred solution for wireless Long Term Evolution  voice and Short Message Service.

Our observations: while IMS continues as the preferred choice for planned services, IMS progress seems to be moving at a glacial pace. Work on IMS standards started at the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) 10 years ago, yet AT&T's U-verse Voice service is still the only mass market offer we know of that uses IMS. We'll come back to this point in a future newsletter (including our 2010 predictions edition at year-end), so if any of our readers know of any other commercial service that is using IMS today, please drop us a quick e-mail with the details and we'll investigate.

Read more about voip & convergence in Network World's VoIP & Convergence section.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Larry Hettick is a principal analyst at Current Analysis.