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Supplier's Voice: Lucent's IMS Service: Enhancing Life and Business
By Cindy Christy
The wireless industry continues to thrive. As we celebrate the impressive milestone of two hundred million U.S. mobile phone subscribers, and two billion worldwide, mobile phone subscribers, we can see that our world is very much becoming a wireless one. Undoubtedly, subscriber numbers will continue to rise globally. But in mature markets where mobile penetration is high and new subscribers are typically lower ARPU (Average Revenue Per User)-generating ones, service providers need to turn their attention towards retaining existing subscribers and generating additional revenue by offering services that stand out from the competition. Increasingly, wireless – as well as wireline and converged – network operators
are looking to the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) to help them address this challenge.
From a technical standpoint, the benefits of the IMS architecture are fairly obvious. Because it is based on IP, IMS-based systems provide a more cost-effective way of delivering services than more traditional, circuit-based systems. IMS makes it possible for network operators to deliver services to any kind of device, on any kind of access network, wireless or wired, enabling anytime, anywhere communications. Also, since IMS supports a wide variety of multimedia applications – and ensures that they can interoperate smoothly – service providers can create, integrate and launch new, innovative services quickly and cost-effectively.
For these reasons, IMS represents an attractive proposition for service providers of all kinds.
IMS Enhances “Blended Lifestyles”
What does IMS do for the average subscriber that earlier service delivery platforms did not? Put simply, the IMS architecture enables the delivery of what we like to
call “Blended Lifestyle” services. More specifically, the IMS architecture makes it possible to create services that blend voice, data, video and other multimedia content — delivered to subscribers anytime, anywhere – in ways that enhance their
lifestyles. Primary market research sponsored by Lucent Technologies indicates that there is significant demand for these kinds of services.
But what is a blended lifestyle service? To start with, it’s important to point out that blending different than bundling. Blending comes about by enabling traditionally independent services to interact with one another, typically by sharing information such as buddy lists, location data, presence information and subscriber preferences and profiles. Much of this information is inherently available in mobile networks. Because they are based on a single delivery platform, services such as instant messaging can be combined with IP voice and video capabilities to create such new offerings as multiparty video conferencing.
