FITTING IN

The question put to a panel of experts at the Voice on the Net show in Boston last week was, “Where does [IP multimedia subsystems] fit in?” No one voiced the obvious answer, which was, “In every mouth, press release and PowerPoint slide at VON.” But a more interesting statement was unsaid in the Q&A session at the end of the panel discussion. Amid repeated promises of the fertile, abundant world of applications that will spring forth from an IMS/SIP environment, one audience member asked what will happen when consumers, acting on their own, start downloading strange services from independent app developers from the Internet onto their IMS mobile handsets. “Who, then, handles the interaction of those services?” she asked. The panel responded with nervous smiles and silence, each seemingly hoping another would answer. “I sit here with some amusement,” said Roger Ward, the panelist from British Telecom, who was skeptical that such wild apps would thrive outside the aegis of the network operator. “At the end of the day, you want the quality you get from the service provider.” True, but on the Internet, we also want the alternative, even when it's inferior. We trust CNN.com, but we're also stimulated by blogs with less journalistic integrity. We buy iTunes, but we also “share” songs on KaZaa. From the next Internet, we want it all. We want to walk through the walled garden, but now and again, though we know the dangers, we also want to explore the forest.