This summary provides an overview of key points from the IMS World Forum 2013 document:
1. SK Telecom in South Korea has seen success with early adoption of VoLTE and RCS services, providing a model for other markets. They launched VoLTE in 2012 and support video from the start, addressing customers with a seamless experience.
2. Speakers at the forum discussed both the technical and organizational challenges of IMS implementations, including issues with interfaces between network engineering and IT, as well as the importance of focusing on specific services and business models rather than overly complex architectures.
3. Presenters shared lessons learned from real-world IMS deployments, emphasizing that people and process challenges
2. SK Telecom are at the bleeding edge of market, and provide important learning
points for other markets on VoLTE and RCS deployments. I reviewed the South
Korean Market here: http://alanquayle.com/2013/04/is-south-korea-the-
exception-or-the-rule/
3. SK Telecom launched VoLTE in mid-2012 and it supports video communications
from launch – unlike RCS (they use RCS for messaging not voice/video comms)
4. NO PREMIUM PRICING for HD Voice. Also given the wasted effort in many
pointless standards, VoLTE interworking is critical – and its not yet done!
6. RCS is their response to internet-based service providers coming in with free
messaging
7. Key is they got it working across all operators in Korea – country focus – hence why
MetroPCS will continue to languish as AT&T and VZ wait for RCS to ‘mature.’
8. They’ve modified the Joyn brand – further proof that Joyn brand makes no sense –
presence shows what you can do not some brand that overlaps the telcos’ brand and
requires fees to be paid for the GSMA for a free service!!!! Why are telcos paying the
GSMA twice – membership fees and Joyn fees?
9. Note interworking is essential, standards are only beneficial! Its all about the
customer experience. Free is critical to compete with the other internet-based
service providers like Kakao Talk.
10. The UC vision is in some cases a framework rather than one UI to rule them all,
hence the focus on APIs
11. Wilfred gave an excellent presentation on the practical project issues on IMS
12. These are the drivers commonly quoted by most telcos. Finally close down the old
PSTN and move to all-IP (get rid of lots of other silos). It’s a cost saving argument –
the most powerful telco argument.
13. Wilfred hits the nail on the head – it can not be forced on the business
20. Complexity is a problem. Many operators at the event talked about it. Some
operators pointed to ACME Packet and their work to simplify the mess and had
favorable comments on their deployments of Acme’s IMS core. Huawei showed an
IMS proxy to simplify VoLTE deployments. So there are ways to simplify the
implementation depending on the telco’s needs. This is a multi-decade transition,
some operators are already 10 years into the migration. However, technology is
moving fast, other choices could soon open up between IMS and do nothing.
26. Very common problems – revenue maintenance not growth, delays, people and
process issues, IMS can fall over so services are disrupted, integration with PBXs is a
pain.
27. Rogers key to success is start small, and build on success
28.
29. Though the service is free – it has a positive bottom-line impact – a 0.2% churn
reduction in a high ARPU segment.
31. Some (not all) services must be migrated. Needs to be an integrate experience –
investment in RCS can help there. Experience trumps everything!
32. Interesting that RCS may not replace RON, even through the functionality is very
similar – shows the importance of APIs for the services to embed where it matters
for the customer and their use cases.
33. My view is RCS should adopt Opus as a matter of urgency. Open Source trumps
Open Standards – which are lagging by several technology generations these days.
37. 10 years in the making, and the IMS glitch hit when there were less than 500k
customers on the platform.
38.
39. Here I’m seeing some interesting cloud / virtualized approaches to manage the
customer profile mess, this also links to UDR (Unified Data Repository) projects
discussed at the PCC conference.
40. If you’re not doing video comms, ooVoo is a partner, if you are doing video comms
then they’re a competitor.
41. Main application is kids connecting and leaving it on for hours in the evening while
they do homework and watch TV together (consumer telepresence)
43. This is a key slide and dispels some of the myths that keep circulating within Telco
44.
45. Rather than the current ‘slow burn’ on RCS, i.e. deploy but don’t tell anyone until
penetration is high enough (whatever penetration that is, 100%?), operators should
focus on vertical solutions, to get up the learning curve faster.
47. It’s a bout making Voice like Text to corporate operations.
48.
49. Iusacell mentioned a common problem that many Telcos in the audience laugh at
given the common painful experience, the stability of the Rf interface, see next slide.
The solution: as so many of the many IMS messages carry redundant information
you can infer what happened – this is the reality of IMS for many Telcos.