Philippe Bouillé Orange Labs philippe.bouille@orange-ftgroup.com

Eurescom study "IMS 2.0 – Constitution of a circle of trust" elaborates on the possibilities of how telcos could open and leverage their assets and empower users and partners with a future IMS 2.0 framework to allow access to functions like authentication, billing, identity, single sign on, messaging, and location.

The existing walled garden business model is at risk. Currently, the broadband business is essentially limited to the value of the access network and if nothing changes, the broadband market will suffer the same revenue and margin squeeze as the voice business. Furthermore, there may be a rapid rise of non-traditional voice services as voice will be embedded into the general online experience. Messaging traffic may migrate to IP based solutions.

Open platform business model

The study shows that the open-platform business model should be considered by telcos. Open platform leaves parts of the value chain to other players like content providers, content aggregators, and service operators. By this the network operator would lose some control, but would win a lot more customers and partners, whereby increasing revenues and profit.

New relationships with users should be fostered: the user could also add value that would attract more content and services resulting in a positive feedback loop, creating potential for big communities. For telecoms network operators it would be the first time to see the customer being a partner rather than only a service user.

Current communication services are launched by Telcos based on the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS). IMS is a multi access, multi service platform that can deliver together with Application Servers rich communication services such as video sharing on fixed and mobile networks. IMS could be of benefit if it evolved to provide similar innovations that Web 2.0 provides. By adopting Web 2.0 technologies, IMS could provide simple APIs for developers, community-oriented services, and a perpetual beta service model. On top of that IMS could leverage its own assets, resulting in more powerful services.

IMS 2.0 assets

Telcos should expose their voice and messaging capabilities and provide an API for telecoms. Other viable and attractive assets to third parties are those that are intrinsic to the network like QoS, network presence based on HLR (Home Location Register) and HSS (Home Subscriber Server), location, charging, or those that are more valuable when shared across many services like shared address books, group lists, authentication and authorization, personalized delivery policies, parental/content protection and limits, trusted identity, or existing IMS services such as Push To Talk.

IMS 2.0 applications

Thirty use cases have been proposed by the study. The most promising appear to be:

• The IMS 2.0 Internet Service Suite would facilitate Internet services for IMS 2.0 users, by providing single sign on, Internet payments, and communication widgets for communities.
• Remote Application Invocation would facilitate IMS’s SIP protocol to immediately start the adequate client application required to display / consume the content and let customers who are not Internet-affine participate in multimedia IP communication.
• ISIM Authentication would allow a user to use his mobile phone as an authentication token to web sites or services.
• IMS Phone as a new interface to Web 2.0 services.

The study has described 20 enablers as well as a global architecture based on the Service Oriented Architecture, a software architecture that allows fast service creation and upgrade through the use of loosely coupled enablers. Several levels of service orchestration have been described, based on Web Services and SIP. These results are available to members of the Eurescom Study programme.

Conclusion

Leading telcos, possibly partnering with other telcos, will provide ubiquitous APIs and will be a natural partner for Internet applications that will mash up Telco communication services and applications. Telcos that don't go for open platforms will likely face declining revenues even for their voice applications. The results of Eurescom study P1751 are available to subscribers of the Eurescom Study Programme at http://www.eurescom.eu/Public/Projects/P1700-series/P1751.

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