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new offerings, and new networks, with existing assets and infrastructure. This is especially true now because there is so much scrutiny on capital and operational expenditure and a load of pressure to deliver more with restrained resources. The industry can’t, and won’t, simply throw money and processors at this challenge. But that set of issues isn’t specific to LTE, it applies to all initiatives across the industry.
Operators are saying “I don’t want to invest a whole more in servers and such,” says Fellows. They’re asking, “Do you have something that can run on open source and Linux, and is there a nice way for me to evolve to LTE in a cost effective manner?” she says. The good news here is that, once again, billing is ahead of the game. Most major billing platforms are available on lower cost, open source platforms. Fellows says operators’ data centers are already shifting in this direction because they prefer not to be locked into one vendor – Linux gives them freedom – and they love the cost-to-performance benefits they can realize. While LTE’s emergence may not be rushed due to tighter purse strings, that’s probably a benefit. It may be built out right the first time with efficiency, integration, and flexibility in mind.
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Operators are saying “I don’t want to invest a whole more in servers and such,” says Fellows |
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Though Fellows doesn’t necessarily agree with me, I’d like to pin this problem on the death or failure of IMS. I found quite interesting the recent news that the IMS Forum is now officially the NGN Forum. IMS was the hottest phrase in the market a few years back, then met great scrutiny and doubt, and now seems to be taboo. We’ve seen many vendors recast policy management platforms as HSS and other IMS related components, but clearly there’s a definition problem here. There are many levels of policy management that apply in a real-time service environment and operators need vendors to help sort out one form of policy management from another with good definitions. That doesn’t mean we need a new standards effort, it just means we need some basic agreement on the big animal pictures level.
IMS tried to solve this problem before it emerged, but the spec is awfully complex and still not very well defined. It may have allowed vendors to have too much flexibility and many argue that the standard was hijacked by competing vendors who wanted to push their own interpretations. Now we
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Policy Management and the
Death of IMS
One area where things aren’t smooth, however, is policy management. “It’s a concern for operators who aren’t sure how it all fits in their legacy environment,” says Fellows. She says that most of the confusion “tends to come in as vendors position their solutions as one stop shops, but that may not be applicable.” In a cost-conscious environment, operators want to leverage what they already have and fill in the pieces that are missing. If policy management vendors all claim to do it all, says Fellows, it’s tougher for operators to understand which bits they need and where to find them
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have a fragmented, post-IMS market that is difficult to navigate. I don’t think the right answer is to try to revive and fix IMS. I think it’s up to operators, through tough contract terms and well defined incentives, to push the vendor community to clarify its offerings and deliver to the actual rather than the philosophical need.
Closer Than What?
To say LTE is “closer than we realize” is admittedly vague. I’m not sure there’s universal agreement on when a real LTE environment would emerge, or what a “real” LTE environment is. To me, LTE means that
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