Ever since ‘A-IMS’ was announced by Verizon, some months ago, blogs and columns have mushroomed all around with comments ranging from ‘Will this set back IMS deployments for several years??’ to ‘I just completed reading the specifications and it looks interesting’ Here is how I see it: Think of A-IMS as a deployable product packaging of the standards that 3GPP/3GPP2 have been creating. Read it again: A-IMS as a deployable product packaging. In other words, Verizon (and buddies) have looked at existing specifications and have asked “For it to be successfully deployed in MY NETWORK, what do we need?” and have proceed to fill in the ‘blanks’. And this is a great thing. Left to themselves, standards always aim for utopia. In the mean time, vendors suffer deployment blues because certain ‘real’ problems are left open, to be addressed later. Most architects will agree that a live deployment only uses 30% of a utopian network design, and this exactly why we always have vendor incompatibilities as standards evolve (ever worked with a Cisco IAD in the early SIP days?). The nice thing about A-IMS is that because it is vendor controlled and not a standards consortium, they are not forced

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