Who needs IMS anyway?

Convergence is occurring with or without IMS, it seems. Today AT&T launched its new Go Mobile service in partnership with Yahoo. It basically takes the Yahoo portal on the AT&T consumer DSL platform and transfers it to the wireless handset on Cingular's network.

I know what you're thinking: another crappy Webmail engine viewed in a slow mobile browser window. But AT&T and Cingular appear to be promising a little more this time around. Yahoo and the carriers have built an application that sits on the Series 60/Symbian OS operating system of the Nokia 6682, which actively synchronizes e-mail, calendar and contact information on the phone with the equivalent information in the AT&T data network. The client also accesses the same photo databases and news engines that the AT&T Yahoo service does, effectively creating a mirror image--on a much smaller scale--on the phone of the DSL customer's PC portal.

This is the exact same type of service we've been expecting the IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) architecture to usher in. And Cingular and AT&T are two of the first U.S. carriers to commit to rolling out IMS architectures this year. The odd thing is, it is not an IMS service. There's no SIP stacks in the phones, no central control plane managing the interactions between phone and PC. AT&T and Cingular are making it entirely a network service, using the exact same dumb pipes as before over their legacy networks. This kind of service has its limitations, but they appear to have integrated the service very closely into the terminals at either end. Maybe Go Mobile won't reach the full potential of an IMS presence-based service, but it's a good step toward it.

AT&T obviously is trying to drive adoption of converged services, making the case for its own DSL services stronger as well as drive adoption of data services over its majority-wireless carrier Cingular. Of course, the potential take-up of such a service assumes that the AT&T Yahoo portal is that great in the first place (something I didn't find to be particularly true when I was covering broadband), but even if the portal has problems, adding this kind of cross-network connectivity certainly makes both the Cingular data service and Yahoo's bevy of features appear all the more attractive.

E-mail me at KFitchard@prismb2b.com.