One of my goals at VON was to dig a bit deeper into IMS, and I had good intentions on sitting in on a few of the IMS sessions. Then the VON blur and too many meetings overtook me, and I didn’t manage to attend the sessions I had hoped to. I did have a couple hallway conversations about IMS, though:
I bumped into Henning Schulzrinne while completing the scavenger hunt to visit 18 vendors and get a sticker from them, in order to obtain a free slingbox. Henning was doing the same thing so we teamed up. We navigated the show floor together, with conversation like “Wait a minute, we missed NeuStar, they are in booth 867″. It was a bit surreal walking around doing this with the father of SIP and RTP, but VON is like that . While thus engaged in completing our quest, I asked Henning what he thought about IMS. Below is how I recall he answered:
Well, it’s a bit too early to tell. It depends on what the carriers do with it, if they use it to build a closed network that keeps non-carriers out, then it’s a bad thing. Otherwise, it seems mainly to enable some new approaches to billing. As far as the protocols go, they are not what I would have designed, but I can live with them.
[Henning, if I got that hopelessly wrong pls write to me and I will correct it.]
I also had fun querying Brough Turner on this topic. Brough is one of the deepest thinkers and strongest advocates I know for consumer net access and the innovation created with the “stupid network”. Brough introduced me to people like David Isenberg, whose conferences, along with similar forums at VON, have helped form my views on network policy. Brough and I have enjoyed many an hour talking about the merits of network neutrality legislation, vs. the need for competition at the edge (3rd pipe), why he’d like to own his own fiber to the CO, why ‘real broadband’ is 100mbs symmetric, and the consumer wireless mesh. And … Brough is co-founder CTO of NMS Communications, a company that amongst other things is … busily building and rolling-out IMS platforms.
Our conversation went something like this:
Me: Brough, I’ve got a question for you?
Brough: What is it?
Me: IMS ?!?!?!
Brough: [laughs]
Brough: I look at it like this. We had the IN [Intelligent Network] for 20 years, and it created 3 services [CallerID, CallWaiting, CallForwarding]. It will take 10 years to build the NGN [IMS] network, and maybe a few services will come out of that too. And in the meantime, the carriers and TEMS are going to need to buy a ton of hardware and software, and NMS is in the business of selling those things.
Lastly, Richard Stastny was kind enough to send a comment to my prior post on IMS, informing me that the IMS pictures I referred to were in page 25 of his presentation. I finally had a chance to sit down and go through the full presentation. It’s quite an excellent discussion of the internet, and the carrier / ITU vision of a the Next Generation Network (NGN) based on IMS. Not only that, but it appears to have been originally delivered in Rome — che bello! Highly recommended if you want an overview primer of what’s going on here.