Could LTE be the killer app for IMS?

Posted by Peter Dykes Friday, November 6th, 2009

Add a comment

News that a number of leading mobile operators and network equipment manufacturers have decided to use IMS for the introduction of voice and SMS services over LTE networks could be a positive sign for a technology that seemed to have been put almost permanently on the back burner. In the last year or so, IMS began increasingly to look like a technology in need of a home, with only RCS offering any chance of a revival in it’s fortunes.

While there are always going to be different ‘flavors’ of industry standards, companies uniting around a common profile is a good start. The One Voice Initiative, as it is called, includes AT&T, Orange, Telefonica, TeliaSonera, Verizon, Vodafone, Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Nokia Siemens Networks, Nokia, Samsung Electronics and Sony Ericsson, who are all in agreement that IMS is the best method for delivering service quality, reliability and availability when moving from existing circuit switched telephony services to IP-based LTE services.

However, as my colleague and senior analyst at Informa Dimitris Mavrakis points out, it is highly likely that early LTE networks will focus purely on data, using dongles and embedded modules. He reckons that handsets will only come after these have been established; hence there is a window of opportunity for IMS voice to become established before LTE handsets arrive. He says that while IMS is indeed late, it might still be some time before voice over LTE is required.

So, it sounds like LTE could be the killer app the IMS camp have been looking for, but so far as LTE is concerned, isn’t it a bit late to be thinking about the best ways of delivering voice and messaging? With 2010, the year the first networks are scheduled to roll out, only a few weeks away, shouldn’t this work have been set in stone by now? It is also questionable how valuable such a standard will be, given the One Voice Initiative doesn’t currently include the likes of Motorola, Huawei and ZTE.