This may also be because vendors are as invigorated by this IMS renaissance as the service providers
are. Infonetics reports that Nokia-Siemens Networks, Alcatel-Lucent, and Ericsson—all of which were
members of the One Voice initiative—are the most commonly cited infrastructure vendors by service
providers asked to identify leaders in the IMS space.
Huawei, however, is named by the report as a credible threat to those European powerhouses, and
has been underscoring the crucial nature of IMS in the growth of LTE in its own right. According to a
presentation by Huawei’s Rebecca Copeland at last fall’s 3GPP release 8 Implementation, Deployment,
and Testing workshop, Huawei is the world leader in current LTE deployments, with 18+ commercial
projects and 60 trials underway, worldwide. The bulk of these projects are in Europe and Asia (which,
according to Infonetics are leading the way in LTE deployment and IMS spend), but there are also
examples in North America and the Middle East.
Copeland underscores the idea that IMS is both useful as a common core for LTE and that the VoLTE
push has made IMS mandatory.
The global spend numbers reflect that.
The IMS equipment market hit the $500million mark in 2010, but that was mostly for fixed-line
deployment. As IMS becomes a more major component of LTE and consumer LTE rollouts continue to
occur, the IMS market will continue to march forward.
“Activity for mobile IMS-based services will increase in 2011,” says Myers, “as we see the launch of
mobile video calling from operators such as SK Telecom and Rich Communication Suite from Vodafone,
in addition to select operators such as Verizon Wireless gearing for VoLTE deployments in early 2012.”
Five or six years ago IMS showed promise, but anemic carrier interest led to accusations of the tail
wagging the dog as vendors pushed IMS on an unconcerned CSP community. Half a decade later,
renewed carrier interest suggests that carriers haven’t given up on IMS quite as quickly as journalists
and analysts have.
