I've been challenged by a source working for a mobile operator whether my view of IMS is too pessimistic. He writes:
The big reason for carriers to implement IMS is not merely a matter of re-structuring our services in a TCP/IP-oriented fashion, or being able to do seamless provisioning. [...]
It is the "enabling" portion of it that matters. Moving to IMS will let mobile operators (for instance) deploy integrated services that can tie together core enablers such as a profile database, a presence server, billing hooks, etc. to build a whole new service with theoretically less time and effort. Essentially, it's about moving from monolithic, one-piece, vertical services into a component-oriented approach.
Of course, current demo services aren't that enticing -- mostly because this entails a new way of thinking about service design that hasn't really sunk in yet, and there is the usual amount of experimentation going on. I personally think this will throw up a few good ideas in a year's time (or even less) as telcos open up to outside partners doing the actual development.
So, the yellow brick road that takes us back to happy, profitable telecomland seems to have a fork. Turn left, kill wicked witch, deploy new services, become rich. Turn right, open up our platform, let the scarecrow and tin man work out what the best services are, click heels, get rich.
Unfortunately, this wizard can't offer a happy ending for either direction.
Can the carriers deliver on the promise of great new application services?
One way is that they themselves research and discover them. But the precedents are mixed at best. Take MMS (again). What could be simpler than getting users to exchange pictures? But it was a commercial flop. It misunderstood what the value proposition was in the eyes of the user. As I said before, people wanted to share experiences -- as sense of "being there", not just pictures. This means sharing a whole sequence of pictures during a day, and unintrusively allowing a whole string of receipients not at the party/zoo/bar mitzvah to keep up with the event. MMS didn't define a photo repository API, make sharing across mobile and PC devices simple, etc. Recipients had no easy way of saving and organising the pictures. They couldn't track things at their leisure.
And at the prices charged, sharing a whole day's "roll of film" was just prohibitively expensive. You didn't even get a little stack of pictures to hide in a shoebox under the stairs! MMS's immediacy wasn't enough to overcome its deficiencies in competing with the Kodak experience. Flickr got it, telcos didn't.
So even the simplest of services turned out to be a screw-up. On the other hand, Sha-mail was a success. Sprint's picture service, which did incorporate Flickr-like features (outsourced to Lightsurf) was a success. Funnily enough, these are the products that didn't fall out of a standards committee.
[Insider knowledge: picture messaging was a low priority in the Sprint PCS Vision launch, and it only made the cut because the handset folks were only being offered camera phones by the main Korean and Japanese suppliers. There weren't any non-camera models around to stock, so there was no choice in having a picture messaging product! The big news was supposed to be Java downloads and ringtones, but these turned out to be much less compelling to the users. And instant messaging never made the launch, despite being the most in-demand feature requested by the target youth/early adopter demographic! I look forward to contradictory reminiscences from former Sprint colleagues...]
So there's good reason to believe that joint efforts of telcos to develop new services will face an uphill struggle. And stand-alone efforts, as noted previously, are limited by your connectivity user base and are in competition against those of Internet giants.
Rather than 'build', how about 'buy'? Can't you just wait to see what takes off and then buy your way in? Well, that sounded like a nice theory, at least until last week. Then we got to see the price of that strategy. Ouch!
So being the owner of the end application didn't work. What else is there? Well, you can shred your business model into itsy bitsy chunks, turn yourself into a platform, open up, charge some access fees, and let someone else take the credit.
This is an attractive proposition, and one I've promoted extensively. It's just a shame IMS doesn't deliver on it. All the key bits -- federated identitity, profile, billing -- aren't covered by IMS, which is stuck in a old-skool mindset of the services living inside a telco-owned application server working to telco-owned customer data. You don't need much sophistication in privacy and permissions control when you federate with yourself. There's no unified developer program. The architecture is horifically complex. It cuts out the cheap P2P delivery options. It mandates specific technologies (e.g. SIP) when others (e.g. IAX) may be more appropriate for some tasks. No doubt it'll be a lowest common denominator in presence -- your "Away on vacation" status may not be supported, never mind "Needs cheering up". So I'm not exactly optimistic that this route will play out well for the telcos either.
Mobile operators have a better excuse for IMS than fixed ones. There's still a scarcity of capacity that requires some form of QoS rationing -- at least some of the time. As networks get faster, that need decreases. (All those Skype calls on EV-DO seem to work fine without IMS!) But application-specific ways of tying connectivity and service together to do QoS aren't the way to do it.
UPDATE: A reader challenges me to say what I would do and say something constructive for once. It's hard to give a snappy response since my approach would probably try to blow apart many of the assumptions of how we build and finance networks. It's more than just the technology. For example, the way we license spectrum divides the resource up and limits the statistcal gain we would have from sticking more traffic into one bigger pipe. But forgetting all that, what should a carrier today do? Well, it's a bit like my 3G advice: no bid on an overpriced license, improve the stuff you've got, buy up an over-leveraged competitor later in the business cycle if necessary. Increasing capacity and lowering latency is obviously one first step. (Just increasing capacity alone doesn't help your QoS problem -- check your queueing theory text book.) Embrace user-owned networks, get as much traffic off the WWAN onto WLANs as possible. Avoid the IMS tax by deploying simpler QoS technologies already developed, even if it means doing layer 1/2 optimisations. Encourage innovation by opening up some of your platform using cheap web services APIs. (Application logic does not run in the telco.) Focus on other 'convergence' issues like getting MP3 players embedded in your handsets. And so on.
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