IMS - Telstra's secret weapon!

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 10 November 2009 07:04

Opinion and Analysis

IMS - the three letter acronym for the IP Multimedia Subsystem is a term seldom heard and little understood outside technical telecommunications circles, but it's going to have a very big factor in Telstra's competitiveness in an NBN and post-separation world.

Telstra CEO, David Thodey, introduced IMS in an almost throw-away remark during his presentation at Telstra's investor day on 28 October, saying "IMS is very important because it allows you to deliver ... applications [and] content across wireline and wireless in a seamless way. Today you have a completely different experience. You have on your home a fixed environment as compared to your wireless. We have got to bring that integrated together."

Ovum analyst Claudio Castelli, who attended the investor day, said he was "Pleased to see [Telstra's] network transformation strategy evolving with IMS. In our view, the user-centric and access-agnostic characteristics of IMS will allow Telstra to orchestrate services in the network and deliver hosted unified communications and fixed–mobile convergence (FMC) services to enterprises."

He points out that with IMS deployed across its all IP core network, "Telstra will be able to combine not only its two biggest networks (mobile and fixed) but also a whole series of separate platforms and infrastructure within them, and move on from network operations to service integration...Telstra's IMS architecture for enterprise will enable voice and video calling across multi-vendor platforms and multiple access networks, including fixed and mobile. Applications will include multimedia business services, presence, messaging and conferencing, with a unified bill, control and management.

"Once fully deployed, this will create a service delivery framework, making Telstra's network more available to service partners and third-party applications and services."

A key factor here, as I have noted in this column in the past, is that most of these advantages accrue to Telstra without owning the access network, so long as that access network supports IP with the bandwidth and quality of service needed and Telstra is not at a disadvantage compared to its competitors - and this is exactly what the NBN promises to deliver.


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