By Sergio Pellizzari
IMS means convergence and the promise of a unified experience: Communications with rich access to voice and internet and related services, with full access to multimedia and applications, and now with the ability for personalization.
Look under the covers and you’ll see that the solutions offered by leading manufacturers consist of a complex myriad of individual products in the domains of Maintenance, Applications, Session Control, Charging, and Access. Softswitches, Media Gateways, Application Servers, Agents, Session Control entities, Policy and Billing servers are all common elements.
These subcomponents ride on Service delivery platforms and specialized hardware platforms but these subcomponents are often independent entities that may come from different organizations within the manufacturer as well as third parties. More importantly, each of these subcomponents has its own lifecycle. Some are mature products near the end of their lifecycle while others are quite new. Often, they run on different operating systems or different releases of an operating system. The result is a group of independent subcomponents expected to work as one, but what happens when they don't? How do you find misconfigurations? How do you deal with the interdependencies? How do you upgrade this complex set of subcomponents? Do you need to sometimes log into each subcomponent with different credentials? How do you integrate these solutions with other existing OSS back-office systems?
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How do you upgrade this complex set of subcomponents? |
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are tying them together through marketing and an underlying expectation that operations staff will be left to struggle with maintaining each subcomponent, treating each individually. Often accompanying each of these subcomponents are large “method of procedure” (MOP) documents that provide comprehensive but complex lists of manual actions required to maintain each subcomponent. These MOPs involve many manual touches of the network components: manual parameter comparison, checks for existence of alarm conditions, and inventory baselining. These manual actions are highly error-prone, resulting in misconfigurations, misinterpretations, and potential outages.
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Very similar architectures are being used for IPTV, VoIP, and IMS, so how can these types of deployments be expanded easily to a much wider scale? It is difficult enough to manage a deployment in the lab, but how can these be rolled out nationally? Manufacturers are not offering higher level management solutions that unify these solutions, but rather
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Domain Control and Intelligence (DCI) solutions that act as a blanket across IPTV, VoIP, and IMS deployments are now becoming available and offer solutions to many of the problems that result from complexity and scale. You can consider DCI applications to be much more
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