Verizon Wireless Says Full IMS Deployment Likely Years Away

IMS, known as Internet Protocol Multimedia Subsystem, will let a wireless and a wireline phone share a number. It is considered central to fixed/mobile convergence. The major U.S. carriers have indicated they plan to make IMS a big part of their future network architectures. Verizon Wireless and parent Verizon have yet to announce an IMS vendor.

Officials from Cisco, Lucent Technologies, Motorola, Nortel and Qualcomm who have been working with Verizon Wireless on A-IMS the past year, joined the carrier on the call. The group also released a 300-page reference document detailing its work.

“Everyone would assume… that we are rolling out IMS, or A-IMS, now and that would be an inappropriate assumption,” said Dick Lynch, Verizon Wireless CTO. “A-IMS right now is still a concept… and does not have the tangible [results] prepared yet because the standards bodies have not done the due diligence that we're hoping and expecting that they will do to make this something that everyone can use.”

Lynch said his company will start deploying elements of IMS within 18 months. “We don’t expect to see IMS or A-IMS as a single event, but one that’s going to occur incrementally over a fairly substantial period of time -- I'll say one to 5 years -- before it will be everywhere doing all the things that it promises.” He called A-IMS “really an architectural vision of where we believe IMS needs to go.”

The first IMS piece Verizon Wireless wants to integrate into its systems is fully mobile VoIP, a spokeswoman said. The working group focused on such issues as network security and uniform treatment of SIP and non-SIP applications.

“It was important for us to work together,” said Larry Lang, general manager of Cisco’s mobile wireless group. “We couldn’t just do this by piece-part and that meant coming together and really looking at a holistic view of the architecture and focusing on the pragmatic implementation issues. This was definitely driven by Verizon Wireless realizing that in order to make things real you have to be pragmatic, to look at the real issues and real deployment.”

Lang said the next step must be to work with standards setting groups, such as 3GPP, which are already developing benchmarks in the area. “One of the things I think which was a goal for the whole team… was to make sure that this was supplemental to the standards work and not seen as creating some kind of schism,” he said.

Lynch said IMS won’t necessarily roll out faster in Asia or Europe than elsewhere, as most wireless advances have. “This is an equal race,” he said. “I don’t think that Asia, Europe or North America has any advantage here. Everybody has an equal opportunity.”

Though A-IMS has been a Verizon Wireless effort, with the 5 vendors, the company said it expects elements to be picked up by other carriers. Parts of A-IMS will be “backward compatible” with IMS under development by other service providers, Lynch said.

“Because these companies that have been working with us very openly and aggressively also have other customers who have already launched or have already ordered some of their existing infrastructure I think it’s safe to say these folks are going to keep the compatibility in place,” Lynch said. “I don’t see that to be a problem.”

Lynch said Verizon Wireless provided other carriers the reference document. “We have some good response from the carriers,” he added. “I truly hope this is not a Verizon Wireless thing… but rather becomes a worldwide thing. Let’s get a race to see who can get it done.”

“It’s something that if Verizon Wireless is the only carrier to put A-IMS in its network, then it’s worthless,” said Ed Salas, Vp of network strategy and planning at Verizon Wireless. “It’s intended to benefit the whole industry.”

“It represents a very good example of what could be expected from carriers wishing to move to VoIP using an IMS-compliant evolutionary path,” analyst group Ovum said of the announcement.