Telephony

© 2006 Prism Business Media Inc. All rights reserved.

 DOZENS OF VENDORS are marketing equipment based on the standard, and so many carriers have expressed their plans for deployment that it is easy to forget that the IP multimedia subsystem is still not much more than a concept. The integrated services and more efficient application development that IMS will allow give the industry sufficient hope that this complex collection of standards will pay off in the form of a new, revenue-generating network and service architecture.

But before IMS gets that far, there's still a lot of work to do. That work comes not only in the form of ongoing product development, but also in the form of the internal and external tests and interoperability events being conducted by various companies and groups this year and well into next year.

All through their own IMS product development processes, vendors have been conducting their own lab tests and trials and gathering information to share with the rest of the industry, said Mike Cooper, director of global strategy and marketing for Lucent Technologies' Converged Core Solutions group. “During our entire development cycle, we are constantly feeding information back to our standards people, who are bringing it to the Multi-Service Forum, 3GPP, ETSI [European Telecommunications Standards Institute], TISPAN [ETSI's Telecoms & Internet Converged Services & Protocols for Advanced Networks group] and others,” he said.

For a lucky handful of vendors, those internal tests already have transitioned seamlessly — we are talking about IMS, after all — into pre-contract tests in the labs of network operators, and in a few cases, into well-publicized, albeit tightly controlled field trials. However, while demonstrating the capabilities of IMS in a lab or another controlled environment brings the industry a step closer to realizing the benefits of IMS, they don't perfectly emulate how an IMS architecture will perform in the real world, amid the complexities of large multi-vendor, inter-connected networks spanning the globe. Research firms such as Infonetics and Yankee Group also have pointed out that there are practical gaps in the IMS standards that need to be addressed. That's where interoperability events, plugfests and certification testing programs run by industry trade groups come in.

The most notable recent interoperability event was the MSF's Global Multi-Service Interoperability (GMI 2006) test. The MSF has held GMI events in each of the last three years, attracting a growing number of vendors and carriers from different countries. This year, almost 30 vendors brought IMS-compliant gear to five lab locations worldwide, including four labs run by carriers that have committed to deploy IMS. Observers agreed the GMI 2006 brought a level of scale and industry interaction that wouldn't be possible in a single-lab environment.

Speaking in particular about the GMI 2006 event, Joe McGarvey, principal analyst for Current Analysis, stated in an e-mail interview, “The major value of the GMI 2006 event for equipment vendors is that it provides them with what amounts to a sandbox to play in for a couple of weeks, mixing and matching their products with equipment from vendors offering complementary products. Participating vendors tell me that they just can't reproduce the interop situations in a lab environment that they can achieve in a test event such as GMI.”

“The advantage of working with the MSF and creating a lab of multiple implementations and multiple vendors is that having a lab of this scale is significant because nobody else has the ability to gather all of this in one place,” said Mehdi Ghasem, chief technology officer of Lucent's Converged Core Solutions group.

Moreover, McGarvey said an event like GMI 2006 helps the industry confront implementation issues that probably were not addressed by the standards groups that developed IMS. “Standards exists essentially in the theoretical realm, while the GMI event is real-world and deals with implementation. The event is also a great place for vendors to ‘audition’ for the carriers involved.” As evidence of the value of that audition, McGarvey said several vendors that participated in the GMI 2004 event ended up being on BT's short list of suppliers when the U.K. carrier later announced its 21st Century next-generation network buildout last year.

“For the industry itself, it's a proof point,” said Lucent's Cooper. “You can see how things get put together, and see how it all works in a multi-vendor environment. You also make contacts that hopefully turn into deployments.”

Tom Phelan, principal architect for Sonus Networks, added, “It was the first time some of our equipment was getting out of our labs. Carriers are interested in seeing the results because it gives them a better feeling that they can pick and choose their network parts because they have seen them work together.”

THE NEXT broad industry demonstration of IMS is the IMS Forum's IMS Plugfest for Applications and Services, which will be held between Jan. 15-19, 2007, at the University of New Hampshire's Interoperability Lab (UNH-IOL — which also was one of the lab locations for GMI 2006).

In announcing the plugfest last month, IMS Forum Chairman Michael Khalilian said the January event will be the first in a series of IMS Plugfests that will assemble service providers and IMS vendors. Companies that already have committed to participate in the first plugfest include Empirix, Genband, GlobalTouch Telecom, Sonus, Tekelec and Trendium.

“IMS is fundamental to next-generation IP services deployment, as it allows the realization of true fixed-wireless convergence,” Khalilian said. “However, IMS adoption and development is still in its nascent stages. The IMS Forum Plugfest represents the ideal setting in which to clarify the ambiguity surrounding this emerging standard.”

Ronald Gruia, senior telecom analyst for Frost & Sullivan, also said in the IMS Forum statement announcing the plugfest, “With IMS poised to serve as a primary catalyst for telecommunications growth over the next five years, there is a definite need for applications and service certification and interoperability, a much under-emphasized aspect of telecommunications.” Frost & Sullivan has done research suggesting that the IMS market will grow from $2.5 billion last year to $12.6 billion by 2012.

The IMS Forum and the MSF, both of which built their interoperability events on top of large reference documents addressing details of the IMS framework, are just two of the trade groups helping to contribute information from broader demonstrations to the IMS pantheon Another is MobileIGNITE (IGNITE stands for Integrated Go-to-Market Network IP Telephony Experience). The group has recently completed its first functional specification and eventually will sponsor some kind of certification testing program, according to MobileIGNITE Chairman Sanjay Jhawar. “We have yet to decide if we want to create a separate test environment,” he said. “It will be another 12 months before we have an agreement on how that will proceed. A lot of other groups are doing test beds, so maybe we will work with them in some way. That pragmatic thing to do is not duplicate what somebody else already is doing.”

BROAD INDUSTRY TESTS and plugfests don't necessarily provide all the answers — or even revolutionary epiphanies — about how IMS will evolve in the public network. Nor are vendors likely to suffer specifically for avoiding participation in these events, though the attention that they garner is self-evident.

Even GMI 2006, for which official results had not been announced as of mid-November, may not provide any surprising information about IMS. However, McGarvey said having the proof of concept helps give participating companies a more detailed road map for a technology framework that will provide at least some portion of the under-pinning for most public networks by 2008.

“We're still talking about things that are pretty low on the geek-level, such as interfaces between two obscure functional modules,” McGarvey said. “The type of things you'll see is the discovery that some interfaces are further along than others, and some still need some work. While none of the results will dramatically alter the course of IMS standardization, it will give vendors and carriers valuable feedback on what portions of the standard they should direct the most attention to in the near future, which from a geek-level standpoint is pretty valuable stuff.”

PARTICIPATING VENDORS

Acme Packet Cisco Systems CommuniGate Systems Empirix Ericsson ETRI Huawei Technologies IP Unity Leapstone Systems Lucent Technologies MetaSwitch Mitsubishi Electric Corp. MRV Communications NCS NEC NexTone Communications Nortel Networks Operax Samsung Siemens Softfront Sonus Networks Spirent Communications Starent Networks Tekelec ZTE Corp.

GMI 2006 LAB LOCATIONS

BT Advanced Research and Technology Centre, Adastral Park, in Martlesham, Ipswich Suffolk, U.K.KT Technology Lab in Daejeon, South KoreaNTT Musashino Research and Development Center in Tokyo, JapanVerizon Labs in Waltham, Massachusetts, U.S.University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory in Durham, New Hampshire, U.S www.primemediabusiness.com