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As vendors are outfitting telcos and cable TV companies to support new triple-play or quadruple-play service initiatives, they are doing so in an environment in which network foundations are continuing to evolve and converge. At the very least, this creates some new math to understand.

“What the industry really wants to move toward is more of a ‘triple-play squared’ kind of environment, where a service provider can offer all of these services over either a fixed or mobile environment,” said Alan Stoddard, general manager of converged multimedia services at Nortel Networks.

That doesn't mean developing different service bundles for each kind of environment; it means being able to push the same service bundle to a single user regardless of the type of network connection they have at a given time.

“Convergence is not about the network,” said Cindy Christy, president of Lucent Technologies' Network Solutions Group. “There is a virtual bundling of how you present services on single bill. There is network bundling that enable these services, but the value of convergence for the end user is in simple, seamless application connectivity.”

It's a trend that affects not only operators of both types of network infrastructure, but also all kinds of service providers — traditional telcos, new voice over IP providers, wireline and wireless ISPs, cable TV companies and traditional mobile carriers.

Just in the last year since Supercomm 2004, several wireline and wireless network operators around the world aligned in the Fixed-Mobile Communications Alliance. BT announced its Bluephone project, a strategy to support converged wireline and wireless services with integrated handsets using fixed, cellular, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi technologies. Verizon announced plans for its Verizon iobi integrated messaging and call management service and Verizon One combo handset. Cable companies Time Warner, Comcast and Cablevision signed deals with Sprint for wireless MVNOs. Wireless ISPs such as NextWeb and Towerstream launched VoIP services. And VoIP leaders such as Vonage announced wireless strategies.

These launches and initiatives are building on the obvious direction in which customers are pushing the telecom industry. The phenomenon of customers “cutting the cord” — once akin to some kind of mythical beast that everyone talked about, but no one actually saw — stepped out of the shadows during 2004 at the instigation of number portability the previous fall. Also, industry watchers believe that mobile calls will account for 50% of all calling minutes by sometime in 2007, the first time that will have ever happened.

“Mobile substitution for fixed is one reason in particular why wireline carriers are interested in convergent solutions, but it's not the only reason,” said Daniel Collins, vice president responsible for fixed/mobile convergence at Alcatel. “Everyone wants to provide customers with a complete and portable bundle of services wherever they are at a given time.”

Lucent's Christy added, “Many service providers will have very different kinds of strategies for convergence, but the goal will be the same: How do you expand the telecom wallet?”

But, if carriers are driven by heightening revenue aspirations to deliver a portable or personal bundle of applications to customers, that also raises the bar for the network supporting those applications. Intelligence, flexibility and efficiency will need to be key attributes of any technologies being introduced into the network.

“With more and more minutes going mobile, there will be a call for many new applications,” said Eric Updyke, vice president of marketing and strategic planning at Nokia Networks. “End users will crave a more unified service experience. They'll want multi-radio, multi-functional terminals, and the most efficient way to deliver services will be over a unified core network.”

To many people in the industry, the key to that unified core network is IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) technology. Included in the upcoming 3GPP Release 5 specification, IMS is most often mentioned in a wireless context, as a common service support mechanism that will improve the capabilities of IP-driven wireless applications, such as push-to-talk-IMS is the basis of the Push-to-talk Over Cellular specification that will allow interoperability for this application.

However, IMS also has viability-and arguably more viability in the short term for operators of wireline networks. “We can see the fixed deployment of IMS starting to happen in 2006, and more of the mobile deployment starting in 2007,” said Oscar Gestblom, strategic marketing manager for IMS at Ericsson. “For the fixed network operators, it's about pressure from competition, and looking for a way to fight back at VoIP competition. Fixed/mobile substitution is the other reality they are facing.”

Using an IMS will allow wireline carriers to develop, introducing and manage new services, as well as bundle those services into different packages more quickly and efficiently because it can be the common service infrastructure that lessens the significance of what type of network is being used to deliver services.

“The method of access in the last mile needs to be abstracted away as an issue,” said Mark Labbe, chief technical officer at Critical Telecom. “Telco engineers need more flexibility. If they can view things as a series of services, rather than a series of different kinds of connections, that will make life easier for carriers and their customers.”

Though IP came from the IT world, rather than the telecom world, IMS is in later danger at this point of being viewed as a misunderstood outsider. Labbe said that a growing familiarity and comfort level among traditional telcos with protocols like SIP, an integral element if IMS, will help spur IMS adoption. An interest in deploying IMS technology already is evident in the RFIs and RFPs of wireline carriers. “Convergence is foremost in network planners' minds right now, and they want SIP-based landline equipment and pre-IMS platforms,” Labbe said.

Still, most vendors say that wireline carriers will tackle the transition to IMS, like the overall transition to IP networking, in gradual, small steps. Each carrier will have its own timetable, driven by which and how many applications it needs to support with a more efficient infrastructure.

In the wireless industry, IP is less familiar a concept than in wireline. VoIP has not yet presented itself as a palpable threat to existing mobile voice offerings, nor has it gained credence as a functional weapon for mobile carriers.

“If you look at mobile voice, it's TDM-based, and those carriers have invested in and built mobile voice networks that they don't want to change just yet,” said Ericsson's Gestblom. “Mobile VoIP isn't here yet.”

Yet, VoIP for Wi-Fi environments is here. Wi-Fi and VoIP present a logical technology combination because they are both IP-based, said Irit Gillath, vice president of IP product line management at Telco Systems.

She also said mobile operators may feel the need to deploy IMS more urgently than some people believe, in an effort to take advantage of the progress they have made with mobile substitution, as well as retain more of their own wireless customers, whom can now switch carriers with ease.

“Something you see with cellular carriers that you didn't see before is that they are looking to give more to their customers to keep them,” Gillath said. “One way for them to do that is to establish themselves as the main phone provider into customers' homes. Even with convergence, people still want a home phone.”

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