The week of the 23-26 April is going to be busy for anyone involved with IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) or policy control and real-time charging.
From the 23rd-26th April 2012 at the NH Eurobuilding, Madrid, Spain the IMS World Forum will be running. In reviewing the status of IMS: Verizon continues its aggressive roll-out of IMS, accelerated by its commitment to LTE (Long Term Evolution) and VoLTE (Voice over LTE). Though as we’ve seen over the past year it has suffered a significant number of IMS outages. Many mobile operators that were circumspect on IMS in 2009 have now implemented IMS as part of their LTE roll-out or RCSe/RCS5 plans, for example Rogers Wireless in Canada. Put simply, they changed their minds. Advanced voice services are now being launched on IMS, e.g. enterprise unified communications.
At the conference we’ll be hearing from Larry Baziw, Director, Voice Product Development & Next Generation Services Planning, Rogers; as he reviews the launch of Rogers’ One Number service, their first IMS service deployment.
- Connecting Mobile Circuit Switch domain to IMS domain offering IMS Services to Circuit switch mobile subscribers
- Rogers One Number Service review
- Advanced calling functions
- Network address book
- Creating a connected life user experience through
The conference includes many operator deployment case studies as well as some frank reviews on the environment IMS will find itself in, for example there is a panel session on: “Facilitating interoperability between operators and OTT Players – Partnerships and competition for the future” which includes Alan Duric, CTO & Co-Founder, Telio Holding ASA, who I am convinced will make it a highly entertaining and frank discussion.
I’ll be running a pre-conference workshop on the 23rd April, outline shown below, which includes some of the results contained in the IMS Status Report: Moving Up The Slope of Enlightenment.
Course Objectives:
- Provide a deep-dive quantified analysis of the IMS market status, enabling attendees to understand what operators and suppliers are thinking and planning.
- Learn from real-world operator deployments understanding their challenges and opportunities.
- An aim is not to provide yet another IMS technology training session; the vendors provide enough of them, rather a focused workshop of the practical realities of deploying IMS. However, a brief IMS review is provided so all attendees no matter their background (especially non-technical) can understand the survey results and case studies.
- The case studies will review the environment in which IMS is deployed, including IMS and SDP (Service Delivery Platform), Next generation IN (Intelligent Network), legacy IN, and JAIN SLEE (Java IN Service Logic Execution Environment).
Pre-Requisites:
- Basic IP-knowledge
- Basic telecom knowledge
Who should attend this class?
- Non-technical or technical managers responsible for, or whose platform will need to inter-operate with, IMS.
From the 24th-26th April 2012 at the Krasnapolsky Hotel, Amsterdam the Policy Control and Real-time charging conference will be running. The conference will include operator presentations / case studies from Swisscom, Reliance, Turkcell, Vodafone, KPN, Orange and many more.
I’ll be running a post-conference workshop on the 26th April entitled Policy Control and Charging Workshop: An Independent and Quantified Review, the outline is shown below. Global broadband traffic continues to grow at 75% every 6 months, fueled by over the top video (e.g. YouTube globally and Netflix in the US) and the rapid growth of broadband connected subscriptions and devices, e.g. smartphones and tablets. Apple sold 37.04 million iPhones and 15.43 million iPads (more than HP sold PCs) in Q4 2011. Broadband providers face an ever widening gap between the costs of supporting the traffic load and revenues. Other data points include:
- Mobile broadband subscriptions have grown around 60 percent year-over-year and have reached close to 900 million;
- The spread observed for mobile PCs is between 1 and 7GB per month. Mobile PCs have the highest average monthly traffic volume per subscription over 3G (global average at 1-2GB), followed by tablets at 250-800MB and smartphones at 80-600MB;
- YouTube remains the single most popular mobile Internet destination, accounting for 22% of mobile data bandwidth usage and 52% of total video streaming;
- Skype continues as the undisputed VoIP market leader with 82% of mobile VoIP bandwidth, although its market share has been slightly reduced by newcomers such as Viber; and
- About one third of operators have implemented some form of application-aware charging models.
It’s important to understand there are two problems being managed through PCC, managing customer behavior and willingness to pay to generate the best revenue / utilization of the fixed resources of the network (yield management); as well as creating new charging models and unlock new revenues (revenue management). Telecoms is an old hand at yield management, remember those peak and off-peak charges for fixed line telephone calls? In the UK, even in its early period from 1878 when telephony was provided by private sector companies such as the National Telephone Company (NTC), they had peak and off-peak charges! Nearly 100 years before the airlines coined the term yield management.
Course Objectives:
- Provide a deep-dive quantified analysis of the PCC market status, enabling attendees to understand what operators and suppliers are thinking and planning.
- Learn from real-world operator deployments understanding their challenges and opportunities.
- An aim is not to provide yet another PCC technology training session with lots of speculation on possible ways to make money; the vendors provide enough of them, rather a focused workshop of the practical realities of deploying PCC.
Pre-requisites:
- Basic IP knowledge
- Basic telecom knowledge
Who Should Attend this Class?
- Non-technical or technical managers responsible for, or whose platform / services will need to inter-operate with or take advantage of PCC.