iConverged

The July 2007 IEC publication, titled “Beyond the Quadruple Play: Networking, Convergence, and Customer Delivery” will feature an article I wrote on behalf of my company which talks about why I think IMS is the ideal architecture for such a network.

The download link to the paper is here (Sorry for the indirections, but as I said, I am liberally going to promote my official blog here to - don’t complain - you ain’t paying *grin* )

Broadband IP is a great leveling ground when it comes to converged services being offered by multiple providers. For example, with the availability of Broadband, companies such as Vonage could offer IP based phone replacement solutions threatening the turf of established phone operators. Similarly, Comcast can now suddenly offer Cable VoIP (phone service) and Verizon can now suddenly offer TV services over IP, thereby threatening each in service areas that were traditionally never their turf. Broadband IP has also enabled ‘new kids on the block’ like Skype, Joost and others to offer bundled services that threaten the trillion dollar communications industry as we know it. This is one main reason why carriers are competing to stay alive with “Quadruple Play” blended services that offer Voice, Video, Data and Wireless accessibility into one.

However, providing Quadruple-Play across heterogeneous networks (WiMAX, DSL, Cable, cellular etc.) is a non-trivial task and one needs a robust and well thought out architecture which ensures that services can be provisioned and provided uniformly to subscribers in a way that lends to seamless user experience and operator provisioning/charging and billing.

This paper describes the merit of IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) - an over-arching

architecture specification that enables uniformed IP based service delivery over diverse network types (WiFi, DSL,WiMAX, Cellular technologies etc.) as the ideal architecture for operators to deliver Quadplay services to their users.