TelecomNext: CTOs want IMS, home networking

A standards-based approach to home networking and the need to make the IP multimedia subsystem architecture live up to its hype are top items on the wish lists of leading service provider chief technology officers, according to a kick-off panel at TelecomNext.

Speaking at the TechThink event sponsored by ATIS, the chief technologists at AT&T, BellSouth, Qwest and Verizon also said they need better quality and dependability from their hardware and software suppliers.

"We don't have a very solid set of standards for home networking," said Chris Rice, AT&T CTO. "There's MoCA, there's HPNA version 3--we need to know what are the standards and what are the test requirements. The home now becomes a much more complex place."

Qwest learned that first-hand in its early VDSL deployments, said CTO Paul Poll, when initial installations took more than a day. Without common standards and a way of remotely diagnosing problems in the home, home networking "can become an expensive experiment," said BellSouth CTO Bill Smith.

He also believes that service convergence should be accompanied by an increase in industry reliability expectations.

"We always talk about five-nines, but I'm not sure that's enough," he said. "This becomes like a jet with one engine--the expectation for that engine's reliability goes up. We need to raise the bar beyond five-nines."

All four men, including Verizon CTO Mark Wegleitner, pointed to IMS as a next major technology challenge/opportunity.

"I think this is how we set ourselves apart from a lot of other people who are trying to bolt this together," Smith said. End-users can be overwhelmed by the new options of integrated voice, data and video services until technology such as IMS is deployed to create simplicity at the customer level.

The danger is if IMS doesn't live up to its hype, Poll said. "We need to focus on the challenges," he said.

Wegleitner said the industry should view IMS as "more of a journey than a destination," adding that one challenge he sees is the integration of non-SIP applications into an IMS network.

Another challenge, Smith added, will be integrating the IMS world with the Web Services world, to unite both the network and the IT piece of the service delivery puzzle.