Still tethered

Embarq, the independent telco recently spun off from Sprint, hasn't publicly announced a strategy for IP multimedia subsystem deployment, like market giant AT&T. Nor has Embarq issued a phonebook-sized manifesto proposing tweaks and enhancements to the IMS standards, as mobile industry titan Verizon Wireless has. Yet, Embarq suddenly seems to be moving more quickly than any other U.S. telco to offer what might be described as a “pre-IMS” fixed/mobile converged, or FMC, service for business and corporate enterprise users.

The Overland Park, Kan.-based carrier, now the fifth-largest local telco in the U.S., formally launched its SmartConnect FMC service late last month. After quietly rolling out the service this summer in Las Vegas, Orlando and Charlottesville, Va., Embarq last month added the markets of Fayetteville, N.C.; Mansfield, Ohio; and Ft. Myers, Fla. SmartConnect is dependent on a converged service node, supplied by vendor start-up NewStep Networks, that can use SS7, session initiation protocol or other standard signaling protocols to prompt media gateways and other network elements in how to direct voice calls over the public wireline network or the wireless network. Call traffic doesn't actually pass through the node.

How users interface with that node depends on which of two service flavors they purchase, SmartConnect Basic or Smart ConnectPlus. The basic service allows in-call forwarding from a wireline desk phone to almost any mobile phone. “Hopefully, it's an Embarq handset,” said Kenny Wyatt, vice president of products and marketing at Embarq, which offers wireless service through a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) agreement with Sprint. “But it could be anybody's handset and network.”

Meanwhile, SmartConnect Plus may represent convergence in a truer sense, allowing a seamless migration between Embarq's CDMA wireless network and an enterprise's on-premise Wi-Fi network that is not reliant on a manual call transfer. To do that, customers must purchase a new handset, the Starcom Packet PC 6700, which is the only handset available to work with SmartConnect Plus so far. “There isn't a plethora of dual-mode Wi-Fi/CDMA handsets available yet, but we'll consider more handsets as they become available to us,” Wyatt said.

Finding FMC-enabled handsets might be a bit more of a challenge for Embarq because most of the commercial FMC deployments so far have used unlicensed mobile access (UMA) technology, a solution initially available only for Wi-Fi/GSM roaming (though a CDMA version is in the works). International telcos such as BT, France Telecom, Telecom Italia and others have launched services based on UMA because the access-layer FMC solution was available well ahead of the commercialization of IMS standards. True IMS-based convergence in the public network core remains a work in progress as 3GPP continues to work on the releases that address various aspects of IMS.

But there are carriers like Embarq, for which UMA may not be an obvious choice, but that see a market demand for service convergence now, despite the gestating nature of IMS. “Our interest in doing this service came from customer feedback forms, and we turned it into a product,” Wyatt said. “Business customers say they want a service with the mobility of a wireless device, but they can't run their offices completely on a wireless network.”

Craig Gosselin, chief marketing officer for NewStep, added, “The drivers for enabling fixed/mobile convergence vary, but the common theme is forward-looking management seeing that the communications user experience is changing. When users are mobile, they may not be tethered by a wire connected to a wall, but they are still tethered by technology that limits them from moving between wireless and wireline. They want to be free of that.”

Meanwhile, carriers that want to enable FMC for these customers may feel they are still tethered to an IMS standards evolution that isn't evolving at the same speed as their customer demands. However, vendors such as Convergin, Leapstone and NewStep are looking to convince those carriers that they don't have to wait for that IMS evolution to be declared complete. Those vendors have created converged service nodes and service capabilities interaction management elements (identified by the easier-to-swallow acronym SCIMs) that employ aspects of IMS standards and, more specifically, aspects of IMS' long-awaited voice call continuity (VCC) specification for seamless call handover that are available today. These elements also use recommended methods from 3GPP, 3GPP2, the IMS Forum, MobileIGNITE and other industry groups on how to handle call hand-offs between circuit-switched and IP network environments. Simply put, these elements allow the service convergence to happen immediately, while the network convergence happens more gradually.

“Most of the telcos at this point are looking to add value to fight mobile substitution, and they are pretty familiar with service convergence,” Gosselin said. “It's getting out of the lab and into the market.” But the industry remains focused on IMS as a long-term future goal, he added. “Even though some carriers will use UMA, everyone is focused on eventually moving to VCC to support FMC.”

Groups like MobileIGNITE have stepped in to try to make IMS seem like less of a long-term proposition than it seems to be. While the IMS hype machine has been churning at full speed for more than two years, the actual standards work has come to seem like a perpetual work in progress. Portions of the IMS standards are included in 3GPP Release 5, Release 6 and Release 7. “Release 5 is finished and out there; Release 6 is almost done,” said Sanjay Jhawar, chairman of MobileIGNITE and senior vice president of marketing and business development for 724 Solutions. “Much of the VCC specification is handled in Release 7, which is under discussion.”

Jhawar said MobileIGNITE is chartered to take the parts of IMS standards and specifications that have found some industry consensus and aren't controversial and set to work on developing processes and a certification program for interoperable, end-to-end IMS networks. Similar to the Wi-Fi Alliance or WiMAX Forum, it focuses on the thorny implementation issues that standards groups don't address.

“Typically, you get a standard ratified, you test it and then you get your product plans and interoperability figured out [over a period of a few years],” Jhawar said. “But a lot of customers now want to move faster, and there is now reason you can't do all this in parallel.” Jhawar said MobileIGNITE's existence is based on the notion that an industry group jumping in to accelerate interoperability can “take 12 to 18 months out of the whole process.”

The organization aims to develop interoperability recommendations in three areas — pre-IMS call handover, mobile Centrex and converged messaging. In late September, it issued its first specification covering handover. As MobileIGNITE moves its specifications toward some kind of certification testing program, it could end up working with other industry groups contributing to IMS interoperability.

“We could have another 12 months of work ahead of us on that, and the pragmatic thing to do is not to duplicate what other groups are doing,” said Herman Pon, a member of MobileIGNITE's board and vice president of corporate development for Tekelec. “We're just trying to fill in the gaps to help people get to market faster.”

Jhawar and Pon acknowledged that carriers ultimately have to follow their own market demands rather than wait for a fully formed VCC specification before trying FMC. Jhawar acknowledged that Embarq's SmartConnect launch illustrates that there are different ways to support a basic FMC now and still be in a position to easily migrate to a more fully featured, standards-based IMS environment later.

“Embarq's service is interesting because the nature of it is a loosely coupled pre-VCC architecture that uses the [public network] to connect calls,” Jhawar said. “Loosely coupled” is a business designation rather than a technology reference. It describes the relationship between the telco and the wireless carrier that are handing off calls to one another. “VCC is not loosely coupled,” Jhawar said. “It's a specification that assumes, a close, integrated connection between the wireline operator and the wireless operator.”

A loosely coupled approach might fit Embraq well because in many cases, it will be handing off calls to its own wireless MVNO, but Jhawar said that carriers that use a loosely coupled arrangement typically will need to forge a tight business relationship to ensure they can easily resolve any service issues that crop up.

Yet, while a loosely coupled service may help carriers address urgent market needs for more flexible voice services, VCC is just one part of the full IMS framework that eventually will help carriers move far beyond basic voice FMC to deliver converged multimedia services. In a world where the ongoing validity of voice as a money-making service and the dominance of voice as a preferred method of communication continue to be questioned, IMS may very well prove to be worth the wait.

SOME FMC TRIALS AND DEPLOYMENTS

Wireless operator	Infrastructure vendor	Launch date
AT&T	Lucent Technologies	Service deployment scheduled late 2006 or early 2007.
Bahamas Telecommunications	Convergin	Deal announced May 2006; deployments under way
BT	Alcatel/Lucent Technologies, Ericsson	Commercial deployment planned for early 2007
Embarq	NewStep Networks	Commercial launch last month
Elisa (Finland)	Nokia	Trial announced August 2005. Launch date not yet released
France Telecom	Siemens	Ongoing three-phase project
KPN (Netherlands), E-Plus (Germany) BASE (Belgium)	Siemens	N/A
MiRS Communications (Israel)	Tekelec	Deployment under way. Deal announced December 2005
Netia (Poland)	Lucent	N/A
Sprint Nextel/Cable TV joint venture	Not Announced	N/A
Swisscom Mobile & Fixnet	Ericsson and Siemens	Trial under way
Telecom Italia	Ericsson and Nokia	Mass-market launch Q205
Telefonica (Spain)	Ericsson	Deployment of IMS solution began in late spring 2005.
Telemar Oi (Brazil)	Nokia	Trial announced October 2005
Telenor (Norway)	Nokia	Trials under way.
Vodafone Group (U.K.)	Nokia, Ericsson	N/A
Adapted from inCode Wireless IMS Matrix, July 2006, and published reports