* Verizon Wireless' A-IMS proposal
Is Verizon Wireless’ A-IMS proposal a genuine standards proposal? Or a customer-specific RFP…
Verizon and its five vendor task force are offering Advances to IMS, or A-IMS, in an effort to fill in the “white space,” or gaps in the 3GPP’s IMS and 3GPP2’s MMD specifications. Specifically, A-IMS addresses what Verizon Wireless views are IMS/MMD deficiencies in security, wireless VoIP QoS, and support for non-SIP network elements and services, such as HTTP and peer-to-peer protocols.
Verizon Wireless says it hopes to garner industrywide support and participation in A-IMS. That seems like a long shot — competitors Cingular and Sprint Nextel are lukewarm at best to the proposal, and 3GPP and ETSI say they will need some persuading as well. And European operators have different technological priorities than operators in North America, especially with regard to voice and VoIP.
But North America vendors are on board because no matter how successful or unsuccessful A-IMS is in garnering industrywide support and/or standards status, there seems little doubt that A-IMS will live on as a Verizon Wireless procurement standard — even though the operator says its “intent is to move forward with an industry standard solution.”
While one vendor hand salutes the standards altruism, the other is opening the wallet.
“As one of the largest telecom operators in the world, Verizon Wireless has huge resources and influence,” says Tom Valovic, program director for VoIP Infrastructure at IDC.
“The five vendors involved will need to adjust their product portfolios to accommodate the new architecture even as new uncertainties are introduced in terms of whether these changes will ultimately get adopted by 3GPP, 3GPP2 and other core standards bodies.”
Says Jonathan Hindle, senior manager in Cisco’s Worldwide Mobile Marketing Organization, “I remember talking to one operator who made the comment that his job was not to deploy standards; his job was to deploy a profitable network and use standards where it was appropriate.”
Indeed, A-IMS seems to have spun Cisco’s position on IMS around. Cisco officials have bashed IMS for being a “walled garden” allowing operators an undue amount of control over the subscriber experience.
But here Cisco is, weeding the bed for a large customer planting more bulbs for that walled garden.
Larry Lang, vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Mobile Wireless group and Broadband Subscriber Applications business unit, sought to distance himself from the walled garden analogy during last week’s A-IMS press conference.
“I’m not sure I’ve used those words and I’m not sure in what context it is…but we had a concern that IMS seemed to make an assumption that all applications cooperated with the framework,” Lang said. “Our concern was, that didn’t match up with real world experience partly because there’s a large installed base of applications — e-mail, Web surfing, peer-to-peer — that predate IMS. Going back some months now, we have been pointing out that it’s important to extend the work to take into effect those things that do not interact with IMS.
“In terms of the walls, I would point out that (A-IMS) is doing more for security,” Lang said. “People think about walls keeping them in, but nowadays more and more users are worried about security and actually would welcome some walls.”
