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IMS Service Rollout Challenges

·        One of the primary challenges to operators is to rollout faster, smaller, and cheaper

·        Integrated systems support in IMS helps to reduce the incremental cost to launch new services

·        Carriers will need to rapidly bring new features targeted to smaller segments of the market at lower cost.

The IMS Challenge with Present Networks

·        Many of the features are administered and delivered through dedicated systems to control provisioning, customer care and billing.

·        Voice provisioning and data provisioning are normally separate with separate billing and customer care systems as well.

·        This triggers greater down-stream costs such as integrated voice and data billing and increases the costs of offering bundles since it is more difficult to align the disparate billing systems.

The Challenge to Rollout New VAS Applications based on IMS

• IMS is not economically viable if the goal is simply to replicate existing services in a new architecture. The payoff of IMS is to develop and introduce new value-added services for incremental revenue at a lower cost per subscriber.

Emerging IMS Feature Areas

·        Once the advancement of new features gets underway, there will be richer, more media-inclusive features introduced. These may still be single-user or multi-user focused but they will involve both voice and data for full implementation. Some examples include:

·        Emerging Features in the Growth and Spread of IMS:

-         Single-user Features:

·        Voice with Audio Streaming

·        Vertical applications for enterprise

-         Multi-user Features:

·        Content Sharing among user groups

·        Entertainment content and sharing

·        Multi-party voice conferencing

·        Personal Assistant to manage contacts

-         Enhanced Services:

·        Group calling and management

·        Synchronizing address book with network

Network Operator Challenges with IMS

·        Network operator challenge: Start with Today's network; keep it Small and Simple

-         Let the market help drive the path of development

-         It's not hard to dream up plenty of enticing, flashy, unique feature ideas, but new services must be relevant to the marketplace and hit the magic formula for timing, value, pricing, need and luck.

-         Features must deliver compelling value to the right market segment, with great performance at the right price and at the right time. In addition, the IMS architecture introduces several new functions which require some adaptation and integration into the existing business processes before more complex services can be successfully introduced.

-         Carriers will want to start with small, simple single-user services to build up the necessary experience base to progress to more complex offerings. Initial service offerings will not likely be fully IMS compliant from the start. Phased implementation of IMS functions will focus on gaining maximum utilization of existing network assets and will make use of existing provisioning and billing platforms. Inter-working gateways will translate existing network protocols into SIP rather than native SIP applications extending throughout the network.

-         Consider the breadth of the scope of changes that IMS eventually will drive into the network and all the supporting billing, provisioning and maintenance systems. Ultimately, the network changes are dramatic and the architecture will allow for a lower cost structure for the carrier but between now and then there will be temporary and hybrid solutions at all levels of the network.

Carrier Network Issues with IMS

·        The network is destined to become more complex and more expensive before it gets simpler and cheaper. Carrier focus should be on ensuring it does not become less reliable at the same time.

·        A new set of features will emerge in this transition period as each type of equipment provider moves to implement IMS-like versions of their systems. Some may be more IMS and SIP compliant than others and each one is looking to add feature functionality to their systems. Voice mail and messaging vendors will introduce unified messaging services based on IMS standard interfaces but will surely have ways to support legacy SS7 and messaging formats. A hybrid system that has an IMS-compliant engine but pre-IMS interfaces will be a common choice. Since many vendors will offer such hybrids for their systems, the carrier networks can become cluttered with hybrids that do not aggregate to any consistent IMS architecture.

Carrier Finance Issues with IMS

·        The capital investment choices by carriers in the transition to IMS are critical to how quickly they ultimately reach a lower cost network structure. Choosing too many hybrid solutions too early will waste investment or delay the migration to a heterogeneous IMS environment.

·        The competing pressures of driving early revenue gains through new service offerings positioned against wanting to wait to deploy full IMS-compliant solutions will create a difficult balance for decision makers. A certain amount of hybrid, adjunct pre-IMS solutions can be reasonably tolerated if they target high-revenue service opportunities but the real economic gains of consolidating to an IMS architecture only come once a critical mass of IMS-compliant nodes are adopted. Aggressive early adopters of pre-IMS platforms with little or no SIP capability must have a long-term strategy to evolve their investment choices to an end-state model for their network that provides a fundamentally lower cost structure.

Trusted versus non-Trusted Applications:

·        Service Integrity requires a barrier between Service Plane and the Control Plane.

·        Not all applications are created equal and not all third-party developers are created equal. The open architecture concept does not translate to an open door to the network Control Plane. There will likely be major walls built around unproven or non-certified DSP or AS platforms and applications that have the potential to intrude into the Control Plane of the network. DSP and AS platforms are limited to the Service Plane and will be strictly walled off from the network Control Plane except for specific interfaces and under tight network security rules.

·        The telecom industry has experience in safeguarding the control of the network infrastructure. In the PSTN network, access into the SS7 network is highly restricted. There are many examples, even among networks operated by related corporate entities, where network operators directed that the SS7 networks must remain separate and autonomous, forcing the duplication of SS7 nodes for overlapping networks.

Customer control

·        Key emerging battle, fought on many fronts, which will engage wireless and wireline carriers against new VNO entrants who stand to win much new ground.

·        Wireless carriers have had relatively tight control of their customer base through a variety of means that have reduced the customer's control over their service choices:

-         Early termination fees to lock in the revenue stream for the service term

-         Restricted access to specific Web sites and content (walled garden)

-         Ownership of the customer's wireless phone number

-         Handsets with "locked" network provider settings

IMS and Handset Distribution

·        Wireless carriers subsidizing the initial cost of a wireless phone purchase has been the long-standing model for helping to drive market penetration and reduce customer objections to buy service. Margins on phone sales were sacrificed to lock-in margins on minutes-of-use. For all the years that the major carriers battled for gross adds they routinely subsidized handset prices based on the future earnings from recurring charges and usage while fighting off churn. As the market growth slowed and the operating margins diminished, carriers began to consider distribution strategies that involved less subsidization. The European model where handsets are sold separately as consumer devices with no subsidy frees those carriers from the added acquisition costs.  Decreasing margins will drive US carriers to eliminate subsidies on some phones (especially low-end products) and decrease the subsidies of higher-end products to improve margins. Ultimately, this places more choice in the hands of the consumer and one less bond to the carrier.

IMS and Handset Features

·        Today, the majority of wireless consumers purchase their handsets from branded carrier retail outlets. The phones they obtain are generally pre-selected models that the carrier has customized through the manufacturer with many of the following modifications:

·        private label branding,

·        custom web and messaging options,

·        restricted web access choices (walled garden),

·        Bluetooth functionality restricted to headset accessories but not for interaction with other devices such as printers,

·        Often the handset is "locked" to that carrier's network and cannot be used on another network unless unlocked.

IMS will causes further issues between Wireless Carriers and Content Owners

Wireless Carriers

-         Since the wireless carriers are still the gatekeepers to the mobile customer, we can expect they will act very defensively to constrain the growing prominence of VNOs. Carriers of all sorts will act aggressively to retain as much customer control as possible.

Content Owners

-         The market power of content owners and distributors are also expected to increase as the continued balance between the importance of content versus distribution continues to shift. The greater ability to distribute content across more networks and to an increasing portfolio of devices provides increasing outlets for content which draws content providers and distributors into the mix of active market participants