Merger pals hop aboard convergence express

Who says that bigger must mean slower? Maybe the entire history of the telecommunications industry provides evidence to the contrary, but AT&T's pending acquisition of BellSouth and the 40% of Cingular Wireless that it doesn't already own ultimately could improve the resulting behemoth's ability to offer fixed/mobile convergence services.

Most analysts commenting on the implications the recently announced deal could have on the IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) strategies of the companies involved said there likely won't be any delay in current deployment plans. Those plans include: Cingular's desire to launch an unspecified peer-to-peer 3G application this year; BellSouth's plan to offer a common mobile/landline voice mail box and eventually FMC-based roaming for residential users; and AT&T's goal of making IMS part of its Project Lightspeed IPTV architecture.

“With IMS, I think nothing will change,” said Rene Link, chief information officer and managing director for consulting firm inCode Wireless. “AT&T and BellSouth may be able to go faster as one company than they would have been as two separate companies,” with a shared interest in integrating IMS with their wireless joint venture. “They'll be capable of doing a lot of things faster now and reacting faster,” he said.

Stéphane Téral, directing analyst of service provider next-gen voice and mobile core for Infonetics Research, added, in an e-mail comment, “The question is not if but how and when AT&T/SBC/BellSouth would begin converging its separate network islands into one single network for all services. At such a large scale, it will be a long-term project and surely will create avenues of opportunities where entrepreneurs will be invited to cooperate with the … giant vendors that will emerge to take charge of integrating and deploying full turnkey systems.

All of this could be good news for Lucent Technologies, one of those vendor giants to which Téral referred, and the company that was separately, but perhaps-not-coincidentally, chosen by Cingular and each of its parents to direct each of their IMS deployments. Lucent recently announced a new “flattened” base station/router (BSR) IP architecture that could help streamline adoption of IMS and broadband access technologies such as WiMAX and high-speed downlink packet access that would plug into the BSR. Speaking generally this month on the viability of the BSR for any company affected by merger, Mike Iandolo, president and general manager of mobility solutions for Lucent, said, “The trigger of a merger itself doesn't justify reconsidering how you do the network, but a merged entity that had been looking at converged services may now consider that a commitment and look at what needs to be done to make this happen.”

Although its parents also will need to integrate operations upon the pending merger's close, Cingular will be similarly poised to accelerate its own role in converged services. “It's a great, great thing for Cingular to see AT&T and BellSouth merge,” Link said. “The amount of time consumed by getting approvals from two different partners to pursue various things has to be incredible.”