IMS World Forum attracts a small, but high quality mix of industry leaders from both mobile operators and vendors tackling the challenges of rolling out IMS infrastructure for services such as VoLTE and RCS. I had the opportunity to present my perspectives with the conference audience in my session “VoLTE – From Delay to Deploy”.
My presentation was a continuation of our viewpoints shared in a Radisys-sponsored VoLTE eBook, whereby VoLTE is much more than justifying how voice service revenues from VoLTE need to cover the costs of an IMS. The business case is broader than that. On the revenue side, IMS is not just for voice services, but is the foundation for additional revenue-generating services including voice and video RBT, multimedia conferencing, advertising, and RCS. On the cost savings side, operators will see OPEX savings in running a single IP core network, compared to a 3G network that requires IP for data, plus a circuit-switched network for 3G voice. But arguably the biggest business case benefit is that moving voice from 3G to LTE provides the opportunity to free up 3G spectrum, which can be re-allocated to LTE capacity growth. This reallocation can reduce or defer LTE spectrum purchases, which mobile operators are bidding up to very large capex spends. The business case for VoLTE is becoming stronger and clearer each day, so that is why I was encouraged to speak with so many customers and partners eager to take VoLTE beyond early trials into mainstream deployment.
For customers deploying IMS, Radisys was promoting our concept of OneMRF to maximize the deployment benefits, whereby any and all interactive IMS services should all be sharing the same MRF. I also emphasized how Radisys offers a complete MRF portfolio – virtualized MRF, software MRF, and hardware MRF – maximizing the deployment options for our customers and partners. Many of our early VoLTE trials and deployments are using Radisys Virtualized MRF (vMRF) in a cloud deployment. However, VoLTE will eventually ramp and replace 3G voice, requiring significant media processing power in the IMS, particularly for HD video or HD multimedia transcoding requirements. Not if, but when that occurs, Radisys customers can seamlessly migrate to the Radisys MPX-12000 broadband MRF with industry-leading capacity and fault resilient features.
On a final note, I want to congratulate Radisys’ partner Mavenir on their Virtualized RCS Solution winning “Best RCS Package” award win at the IMS Industry Awards. The scope of the Mavenir RCS solution includes real-time voice and video calling and conferencing, which are powered by Radisys virtualized MRF solutions in a number Mavenir VoLTE and RCS trials and deployments around the globe. So in a sense, Mavenir’s success is a part of our success, as all good partnerships should be.
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