By
Tim Young
Perspective is a fascinating thing.
If you drive a little ways out of Chicago, where I live, you’ll find yourself in the middle of the pancake-flat rural Midwest. The wide expanses of farmland are cut by roads that are very often perfectly straight for miles.
As your eye follows the road off into the distance, the sides of the road, of course, seem to move closer and closer together until they eventually join- Until they converge.
Convergence: a coming-together. Convergence continues to be a favorite rallying cry for CSPs and OSS/BSS vendors alike. It has lost its effectiveness as a buzzword due to sheer overuse (just as Journey’s classic song “Don’t Stop Believin” has become less enjoyable for me after hearing it butchered at countless karaoke bars). Still, convergence is a valid goal and an apt descriptor for a number of sub-goals within the telecom space (just as, to continue the Journey metaphor, I still get chills when Steve Perry hits the high notes, no matter how unavoidable the song is at sports bars and frat houses).
For a long time now, the key architectural framework mentioned in any discussion of convergence has been IMS. When the 3GPP began to envision a world beyond GSM, with newer mobile devices requiring and receiving faster and more diverse and complex services, IMS was created. As the network in question moved from GPRS to other wireless and wireline networks, the potential usefulness of IMS grew.
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“Convergence” has lost its effectiveness as a buzzword due to sheer overuse. |
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customers leverages IMS, and the framework promises to grow to encompass more elements of the giant’s network as further innovations seem farther and farther off.
And there are plenty of others who underscore the importance of IMS. “IMS will play, and already is playing, a very significant, huge role in convergence,” said Vadim Rosenberg, Global Director, Telecommunications for CA Inc. “This is mostly driven by the need for CSPs to close the gap they are facing due to the decline in legacy service revenue, especially voice.” Indeed, CSPs looking to derive new and different revenue from existing customers,
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Over time, there have been ebbs and flows in IMS uptakes. AT&T moved away from the architecture, and then came back to it, viewing it as an incomplete, but promising, framework. More recently, as the economic lean times have continued to lower revenue, AT&T and Verizon have both revved up IMS plans. AT&T’s VoIP service for its U-verse
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and to ultimately attract new ones, can benefit from IMS. New services are increasingly IP-based. They’re web-based applications, very often. They need an architecture than can handle their IP nature. “IMS provides that architecture,” Rosenberg said.
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