An all-too familiar pattern

The new ABC series “Daybreak” features a man who is reliving a terrible day in his life, but being given a chance to change the outcome each time.

With its IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) efforts, the telecom industry is reliving some of its past as well, but with no assurances of different outcomes.

Although many things have changed about the telecom industry over the last two decades, there are some things that seem eternal. One of those is the search for a network architecture that enables rapid service creation by separating the service layer from the network piece parts and creating standards-based interfaces that allow those piece parts to be used and reused as modular building blocks in a plug-and-play scenario that eliminates dependence on vendor-specific technology.

What I’ve just described sounds like IMS--but it could also describe the intelligent network effort of the late 1980s that included multiple industrywide efforts including the Advanced Intelligent Network (AIN) and individual company initiatives.

For decades now, service providers have wanted the ability to design their own new services--or hire smart outsiders to do so--without being dependent on their hardware and software vendors to do all the development work for them. They’ve wanted industry standards that eliminate proprietary technology and make it possible for network service providers to use off-the-shelf technology--or at least best-of-breed systems from telecom-specific vendors.

So why is this all so hard? As a recent Yankee Group report indicates, IMS is starting to run afoul of its own hype and suffer some of the same kinds of problems that ultimately stymied previous efforts at the nirvana of network architectures. As happened in the 1980s when companies such as Pacific Telesis (now part of AT&T) launched their own IN initiatives out of impatience with the industry, Verizon launched its own version of IMS last summer.

Granted, I’m now among the industry’s senior citizens, but this has a very déjà vu feeling about it, and not in a positive way. Unless things change, IMS could be seriously derailed, or produce a much less ambitious transformation of the telecom network that is intended--or very much needed.

Like Taye Diggs’ character on “Daybreak,” the telecom industry needs to learn from what has gone before or be doomed to repeat it.

E-mail me at Cwilson3@telephonyonline.com.