Jun 5, 2006 12:00 AM,

IMS connects with cable

By Dan O'Shea

The interest the cable TV companies have in offering voice over IP and wireless telephony services is nothing new in itself. The major multiple systems operators in the cable TV industry have been flirting with voice for the last decade and, with their established base of subscribers, have longer been considered the potential competitors with the most leverage to challenge telcos for their residential service customers.

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However, within the last year or so, technology and market factors have been converging like never before to allow cable TV firms to not only bundle VoIP service with their existing broadband and cable TV services, but also to provide them with a path in the short term to offer wireless services and in the long term to create fixed/mobile convergence services. With VoIP, recent technology advancements in service reliability and the capability to integrate VoIP adapters with residential broadband modems and routers have been a main ingredient for aggressive competitors such as Vonage to successfully market cheap pure-play VoIP to millions of households. Cable TV companies like Time Warner Cable and Cablevision (see chart) have quickly taken the hint, becoming among the top holders of VoIP market share in the North American residential/small office/home office market.

Meanwhile, resale of wireless services through mobile virtual network operator business models has caught the eye of many cable TV companies, which believe their residential consumer relationships give them an entry into selling all kinds of service as part of triple-play or quadruple-play bundles that compete on par with anything that telcos can muster.

Cable TV companies have been looking at how to pursue wireless — and the potential for fixed/mobile convergence that could follow — for some time, and thus far, the most ambitious articulation of those wishes is the joint venture that MSOs Time Warner Cable, Cox Communications and Advance Newhouse Communications formed with Sprint. The venture offers those cable TV companies the ability to resell Sprint's VoIP and mobile services. Also, Time Warner Cable recently filed an application with the FCC, declaring interest in the FCC's upcoming advanced wireless services spectrum auction, a move that inspired industrywide speculation that the joint venture itself is interested in acquiring more spectrum.

Ultimately, all of these strategic efforts are pointing toward a future in which cable TV companies not only will offer wireless services and fixed/mobile convergence, but also converge their networks and services in the same way that telcos and traditional mobile carriers are planning to do so — through an evolution to IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) architectures.

“Pretty much everyone in the cable TV industry is looking at IMS right now,” said Stephane Teral, directing analyst of service provider next-gen and mobile core research at Infonetics Research. “The cable companies have been offering phone service for a while, but it has suddenly ramped up very quickly, and now they need to get the infrastructure in place to deploy more IP services. For the cable guys, it is the next step to do all of these things they want to do.”

Teral said the factors driving cable TV firms toward deployment of IMS are much the same as the convergence factors that are driving other service providers to invest in IMS. “Using IMS will be a way for them to cut opex and will answer the question of how to manage services in a more profitable and flexible way,” he said. “IMS can provide the bridge between their legacy and next-generation networks.”

Within the last year, the technology foundation to allow cable TV companies to deploy IMS has become clear. IMS started in the mobile industry's 3GPP standards body, and more recently, CableLabs, the standards-setting organization for the North American cable industry, has also adopted the signaling core of the IMS specification for PacketCable 2.0. That document specifies requirements for real-time, interactive multimedia services over the cable DOCSIS access networks that already have been deployed by many cable TV companies to support their broadband cable modem services.

“In doing this, Cablelabs has qualified IP infrastructure like softswitches for deployment in cable networks,” Teral said.

That important step by Cablelabs has been followed by increasing interest from cable TV companies in testing and deploying various IMS network components. The most high profile of these tests was a trial announced last month that involved Time Warner Cable and vendor giant Siemens. The trial involved demonstrations of several IMS application scenarios. One demonstration used several online gaming scenarios to test the integration of both packet- and circuit-switched telephony networks as well as a range of different wireless and fixed technologies. In one situation, IMS supported gaming between a user with a wireless device who was playing against an opponent on a fixed-line network device. The two companies have also demonstrated dual-mode handset usage, including seamless handoffs as users roamed from Wi-Fi coverage — either at work and at home — to cellular coverage areas.

“IMS technology is an exciting new technology for consumers who want their devices to work seamlessly together — including presence-aware features that can direct calls, video and messages to devices that are currently in use and in ways that are most convenient for the end user at any given moment,” said Mike LaJoie, chief technology officer for Time Warner Cable, in the statement announcing the trial. “Rather than being limited in capabilities due to silos of network architectures, IMS promises a new world of seamless provisioning opportunities for broadband operators. This will include the ability of operators to rapidly and cost-effectively deploy highly personalized entertainment services.”

Time Warner and Siemens have yet to announce a follow up to their trial, but Harald Braun, CEO of Siemens Networks Division, a unit of Siemens Communications, said the efforts of the two companies will most likely lead to some kind of larger field trial of IMS.

Braun said Siemens began to work with the cable TV company more than a year and a half ago. “The cable companies are seeing what the RBOCs are going to do with IMS, and Time Warner looked at IMS and thought it would be a useful technology to help them move to a quad play,” Braun said. “The number-one application they had in mind at that time was doing voice telephony with a mobile handoff.”

The companies worked to make that handoff capability happen. Time Warner started out wanting a handoff between Wi-Fi and GSM networks, but then it entered the joint venture with Sprint, and having Wi-Fi-to-CDMA capability with the CDMA carrier became an imperative.

“With IMS as the common signalling core, making that change is no problem,” Braun said. “I think it took us less than two weeks to get it under way.”

Braun said the cable TV companies have a nimble and aggressive nature, as well as some network advantages, that might help them charge out front as pioneers with IMS technology. While telcos have a large amount of legacy infrastructure in their networks that they are managing as depreciating investments, cable TV companies don't have such considerations. If they deploy softswitches, media gateways, application servers or other IP infrastructure, it is as a greenfield deployment where nothing is being ripped out.

“The telcos have a lot of legacy stuff in the networks, and they want to get something and then test it for a couple of years, but the cable TV guys tell us, ‘Get out of here and just go do it,’” Braun said. “With the cable TV companies, they have been very aggressive in the past, and where they are going in the future will be all over IMS.”

Sanjeev Chawla, chief technology officer and executive vice president of engineering at BayPackets, said IMS architectures also will help cable TV companies further exploit their edge in providing video services as telcos launch their own IPTV services. “IMS is going to help them do things like video mail and calling, and video caller ID,” Chawla said. “They also have the experience providing video and working with the studios for content, while the telcos will be trying to catch up.”