The Birth of a New Network (Cont'd)

The impact of IMS on a new generation of communications services is equally as significant as its effect on the relationship of those services to the underlying network. For more than 100 years, the telephone network itself represented the service offering. When people ordered phone service, physical connections were made or built for them. There was no real distinction between transport and access technologies and the voice calls they carried. The network was the service.

Even with the emergence of data networks and basic high speed data services, "the pipe equals the service" model persisted. Service came to mean connectivity. When a customer ordered a service, physical resources were commissioned as necessary, and logical connectivity was established to meet the request.

Emerging all-digital, content services transported over IP-based infrastructure are shattering this traditional model, in many ways separating the service itself from the network that carries it. Rather than simply comprise access and transport connectivity, communications services are moving up the value chain and assuming connectivity. Services that are more than pure connectivity include VoIP, online gaming, broadcast IPTV, and pointcast streaming video and audio. Services now span access and transport (xDSL, FTTx, WiMax, metro rings and core) to include the "content appearance point" (content server, head-end, etc.) and the IP multimedia terminal (whether that is a cell phone, TV, residential gateway, or gaming console). In such an environment, CSPs must both establish and manage the underlying service- and media-agnostic connectivity and lay the digital content and applications on top of it.

By ushering in the rise of the IP control plane, IMS bridges the widening gap between network and service. It provides a signaling and control layer above the pure IP transport plane and below the service itself. Applications can essentially use the IMS layer to control the underlying network and ensure that requested connectivity meets the needs of the content-based service.

What IMS Means for OSS
Whether IMS proves to be all that industry watchers expect remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: if IMS does rock the world of communications networks and services, it will have an equally transforming effect on communications service fulfillment. This is due primarily to the signaling and control layer IMS introduces, creating more intelligent networks that support more dynamic service offerings. Because IMS addresses a host of logical functions that - in "lesser intelligent" networks - are conventionally handled by the management domain (i.e., OSS), its rise will demand a significant shift in Operations Systems.

Traditional OSS were built to support relatively "dumb" networks - that is, networks with a thin control plane, where each device effectively had to be told what to do. In a world of self-adapting, converged, "smart" networks based on advanced control planes - like IMS promises - OSS must instead accommodate, complement, and leverage that embedded intelligence. As such, "operations" will come to mean telling the network what you want, not deciding and driving its every change and movement.

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