Verizon teams with major vendors to enhance IMS

Stuart Corner
Sunday, 30 July 2006 19:27

IT Industry - Strategy

In a move likely to have a significant effect on the evolution of today's disparate fixed and mobile networks to converged all IP next generation networks, Verizon, Cisco, Lucent Technologies, Motorola, Nortel, and Qualcomm have announced jointly developed enhancements to the IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) under the name 'Advances to IMS (A-IMS)'.
Since it was standardised by 3GPPP for cellular networks, the role of IMS has expanded enormously and it is now a key architectural underpinning of converged fixed and mobile networks. The Verizon-led group says it has greatly expanded on the specification and in particular beyond the session initiation protocol (SIP).

The group promises that the extended specification will support the implementation of next-generation services in current networks, as well as creating a foundation for the efficient roll-out of both SIP- and non-SIP-based services in future networks.

According to market analyst, Ovum: "Supporting non-SIP-based applications is really the key to ensuring service continuity during the core network evolution. This has not been the focus of IMS specifications so far, which assume in Release 4 that a VoIP move has already happened in the core before moving to IMS in Release 5. As a consequence, the standards consider there to be a de facto approach to service execution, which is agnostically based on SIP, and have often neglected to take into consideration other sorts of traffic, whether IP-based or not.

'"Verizon Wireless' deployment of CDMA2000 1XEV-DO Revision 0 in October 2003 kick-started 3G deployments in the US market, putting pressure on Cingular and Sprint Nextel to follow suit. Unlike its EV-DO announcement, Verizon Wireless is not the first tier 1 mobile operator in the US market to embrace IMS architecture: Sprint Nextel and Cingular made their announcements before Verizon Wireless. However, Verizon Wireless' approach clearly has more of a carriers' view on how the industry should implement the IMS architecture."

Dick Lynch, executive vice president and chief technical officer at Verizon Wireless, said the company has been working for nearly a year with a task force of the industry's "best and brightest" network engineers and strategists from its partner companies.

"We applaud the visionaries who have done a great job developing IMS over the last few years. But as we approached implementation planning, it became apparent that there are some practical, real-world issues that need to be addressed if we are to transparently and completely deploy and maximise the use of this new architecture.

"To us, it is also important that it be built to support the bridging of the present non-IP reality as we transition to the future. As people look at what our task force has accomplished, I expect that they will see significant benefits, including embedding VoIP hooks into the lower levels of the stack and addressing security issues in a more systemic way."

The current outputs of the task force are a concept document and an architecture document that are being provided to 'industry leaders'. From these documents, the task force companies plan to make necessary standards contributions in the immediate future.

The documents will be available to 'industry leaders' who send an email to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . The group has given no indication how it will determine industry leadership in response to any requests for the documents.