IMS World Forum 2013 Highlights IMS: What Choice Do You Have?

5/1/2013 © 2013 Alan Quayle Business and Service Development 1

SK Telecom are at the bleeding edge of market, and provide important learning points for other markets on VoLTE and RCS deployments. I reviewed the South

Korean Market here: http://alanquayle.com/2013/04/is-south-korea-the-exception-or-the-rule/

SK Telecom launched VoLTE in mid-2012 and it supports video communications from launch – unlike RCS (they use RCS for messaging not voice/video comms)

NO PREMIUM PRICING for HD Voice. Also given the wasted effort in many pointless standards, VoLTE interworking is critical – and its not yet done!

Simple experience embedded in the phone

RCS is their response to internet-based service providers coming in with free messaging

Key is they got it working across all operators in Korea – country focus – hence why MetroPCS will continue to languish as AT&T and VZ wait for RCS to ‘mature.’

They’ve modified the Joyn brand – further proof that Joyn brand makes no sense – presence shows what you can do not some brand that overlaps the telcos’ brand and requires fees to be paid for the GSMA for a free service!!!! Why are telcos paying the

GSMA twice – membership fees and Joyn fees?

Note interworking is essential, standards are only beneficial! Its all about the customer experience. Free is critical to compete with the other internet-based

service providers like Kakao Talk.

The UC vision is in some cases a framework rather than one UI to rule them all, hence the focus on APIs

Wilfred gave an excellent presentation on the practical project issues on IMS

These are the drivers commonly quoted by most telcos. Finally close down the old PSTN and move to all-IP (get rid of lots of other silos). It’s a cost saving argument –

the most powerful telco argument.

Wilfred hits the nail on the head – it can not be forced on the business

Strategy people get it

Finance need a near term drive of revenue protection (difficult to convince) and medium term costs savings – which is really what they believe.

Operations is the forgotten group – need organizations to be consolidated, lots of people and budget issues

Here is where the complexity explodes, and often failures at the interface between IT and Network Engineering – HSS failures or AS failures

This is where the failures in communications are highest, NO ARCHITECTURES – focus on SPECIFIC services and business models.

Really just used for fixed voice, with RCS in soft launch

Complexity is a problem. Many operators at the event talked about it. Some operators pointed to ACME Packet and their work to simplify the mess and had

favorable comments on their deployments of Acme’s IMS core. Huawei showed an IMS proxy to simplify VoLTE deployments. So there are ways to simplify the

implementation depending on the telco’s needs. This is a multi-decade transition, some operators are already 10 years into the migration. However, technology is

moving fast, other choices could soon open up between IMS and do nothing.

PEOPLE and PROCESSES trump technology every time in an organization.

Nerile gave a frank and honest review of their experiences in IMS. I’ve heard and experienced common stories from many Telcos.

Siemens solution was a hosted, it failed on number of technical issues.

Classic IMS launch package

Very common problems – revenue maintenance not growth, delays, people and process issues, IMS can fall over so services are disrupted, integration with PBXs is a

pain.

Rogers key to success is start small, and build on success

Though the service is free – it has a positive bottom-line impact – a 0.2% churn reduction in a high ARPU segment.

Tablet app, and soon phone apps are on the way.

Some (not all) services must be migrated. Needs to be an integrate experience – investment in RCS can help there. Experience trumps everything!

Interesting that RCS may not replace RON, even through the functionality is very similar – shows the importance of APIs for the services to embed where it matters

for the customer and their use cases.

My view is RCS should adopt Opus as a matter of urgency. Open Source trumps Open Standards – which are lagging by several technology generations these days.

Another excellent presentation on the reality of IMS deployments

10 years in the making, and the IMS glitch hit when there were less than 500k customers on the platform.

Here I’m seeing some interesting cloud / virtualized approaches to manage the customer profile mess, this also links to UDR (Unified Data Repository) projects

discussed at the PCC conference.

If you’re not doing video comms, ooVoo is a partner, if you are doing video comms then they’re a competitor.

Main application is kids connecting and leaving it on for hours in the evening while they do homework and watch TV together (consumer telepresence)

Strong in the US

This is a key slide and dispels some of the myths that keep circulating within Telco

Rather than the current ‘slow burn’ on RCS, i.e. deploy but don’t tell anyone until penetration is high enough (whatever penetration that is, 100%?), operators should

focus on vertical solutions, to get up the learning curve faster.

Martin Geddes defined the 5 characteristics of HyperVoice

It’s a bout making Voice like Text to corporate operations.

Iusacell mentioned a common problem that many Telcos in the audience laugh at given the common painful experience, the stability of the Rf interface, see next slide.

The solution: as so many of the many IMS messages carry redundant information you can infer what happened – this is the reality of IMS for many Telcos.

Excellent presentation on service innovation – just do it!

Challenge many Telcos find themselves in – another honest assessment

Challenge many Telcos find themselves in – another honest assessment