Wrap-up presentation of highlights from IMS World Forum 2011

1. A Quick Wrap Up of Presentations
at IMS World Forum
“What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.” Ecclesiastes 1:9
May 2nd 2011
alan@alanquayle.com
www.alanquayle.com/blog
5/2/2011 © 2011 Alan Quayle Business and Service Development 1

2. From Larry Baziw, Rogers, important issue of focusing upon the customer experience, a point made at the start
that was ignored by most other presentations.

3. From Larry Baziw, Rogers, this is a key value add – operators can aggregate many services, delivering services
that just work and do not require both parties to be on the same OS / client, internet connected, and using a
smartphone. Customer experience is critical.

4. From Larry Baziw, Rogers, this highlights an assumption made by many in the conference that operators deliver
quality services because of network QoS, and over the top providers do not. For most customers that is not their
experience, they do not think operators deliver quality of service given the dropped calls, low quality voice
(especially compared to Skype), SMS disappearing into black holes, high charges, no feedback requested at the
end of a poor call, etc. Note with fatter pipes QoS matters less.

5. From Huawei, a great slide highlighting simply the threat to operators core business from their current trajectory.

6. From Verizon, their IMS Service Architecture. Which because they need to migrate away from CDMA fast,
requires they adopt LTE and VoLTE faster than the rest of the World. However, suppliers are not acting in their
GSM customers‟ best interest in advising on a path right, instead simply pushing for action on VoLTE now. VZ‟s
other driver is LTE runs on contiguous 700MHz across the US, so coverage will be good including in-building.

7. From Verizon, their VoLTE development plan. With a solid LTE network and high definition audio, backed by
Verizon‟s integrated customer experience, they‟re going to become a tough act for AT&T to compete with. Its
impressive how Verizon has managed what would appear to be a significant challenge – betting on the wrong
technology, to their advantage.

8. From Verizon, a great example on the importance of keeping it focused, no app stores or advertising, simply
getting voice working on their target network, LTE. Though roaming will remain a problem as national LTE
networks for most GSM operators are many years away, perhaps never depending on their 4G plans.

9. From Telekom Srbija, highlight the many problems operators face in IMS implementations. A point highlighted
was around IMS being a destination without a route map. Key is to use mature solutions and take it step by step
as it is complex.

10. From Genband, highlights some interesting issues with the PSTN model disappearing and telecom-centric
networks displaced by IT/web-centric architectures. That last point is a key issue on the aging IMS architecture
which was built in the old box and wire days.

11. From ACME Packet, another presentation with refreshing openness on the issues with IMS. It was a pity we
didn‟t have many more, especially from operators with their challenges in IMS implementations.

12. From KPN, example of some of the simplifications that can be made in IMS. From the audience one of the
suppliers asked the question, „Where you able to get your supplier to make these changes?”. The answer was yes,
but it‟s a sad reflection on our industry that a vendor asks at all, and in a public forum, such as question.

13. ALU‟s stated driver for IMS was service innovation, we‟ll ignore the fact it ignores the need for an SDP, this
surprised me at the event many people couldn‟t understand what an SDP was used for, they thought an
application server was adequate – this is a great example of the silo‟ed nature of people in telecoms when they
lack an understanding of the total network, and think from their silo they have the complete answer – we
need to „up the game‟ in telco, especially in understanding the totality of the business.

14. From Ericsson, VoLTE was given as one of the drivers for IMS, the other being Video. This was a common
theme at the conference VoLTE requires IMS, so do IMS. But this presupposed operators need voice over LTE,
which many do not. My recommendation is wait for 4G when a national deployment is required. For LTE just
use it for hotspot data coverage. Note there‟s no discussion on call drops or voice quality – which matter much
more to customers.

15. From Ericsson, their other driver for IMS was video, we‟ve been here before in 2000 with 3G. It‟s a pity the
mistakes from the past are not included in today‟s thinking.

16. From Huawei, another example of vendors positioning IMS as the answer to all problems, and more dangerously
claiming there is no alternative, that what is created in IMS will never be repeated. Firstly, it is to be hoped the
wasted effort in IMS will never be repeated. Secondly, given the 100s of app stores, e.g. Apple, Android, RIM,
Getjar, including all the existing operator app stores survive without IMS – this is an example of a slide that
simply should not pass any basic quality review within an supplier.

17. From Huawei, same issue as the previous slide – this is an example of another slide that simply should not pass
any basic quality review within an supplier. Keep the message simple and focused – the above is not credible as
much more than IMS is required.

18. Perhaps a rather rosy
interpretation of what
remain significant issues
where over one third of
respondents (only 22 in
total) cite business case or
BOSS integration as
barriers. Misses complexity
issues many operators are
finding in their deployments

19. Interesting graph on subscribers connected to IMS, shows currently APAC dominates, and fixed
line will continue to dominate with LTE only starting to impact the numbers in 2014 – though
LTE was quoted as the driver for LTE at the conference by many (not just the vendors)

20. This highlight a couple of the problems we have in our industry – business requirements only appear once the
GSMA gets involved, and apart from the business people involved in running their conferences, most other
people are technology biased. So we have a gaping hole in not being business-led through the ecosystem. Plus
all the interop fora are not adequately addressing the problems operators are facing in implementing IMS – as
highlighted in the survey I‟m running.

21. From ACME Packet, this slide for me summarizes where we are on IMS. We‟ve made the simple complicated.
Just setting up a voice call through IMS requires far to many messages to be passed than today, and all those
messages require processing. Some were claiming an IMS implementation has up to 25 times the message
passing of an equivalent over the top services – how can we be competitive with we need 25* the data center