IMS to Increase Revenues for Mobile Operators

ABI Research released the results of a study conducted by it which says that IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) will provide mobile telephone operators with additional revenue of $300 billion within the following five years.

The study clarified that Sprint (News - Alert), Verizon and British Telecom (BT) will rapidly deploy IMS across their networks.

Senior Analyst Nadine Manjaro at ABI Research said, “Until recently IMS was mainly the province of fixed-line operators, but now it is essential to the success of mobile and fixed operators who are losing revenue from traditional sources. IMS enables rapid development and deployment of new services.”

Verizon and BT (News - Alert) are offering an open IMS interface which enables third-party developers access to the network which will result in introduction of new applications. This will further increase the speed of deployment as testing will be faster and this will lead to greater success for the operators.

Manjaro continued: “Operators are forced to look at IMS and similar solutions because they need to start generating more revenue. With recent moves by Sprint, Verizon and AT&T (News - Alert) to offer less profitable flat rate services as a way to fight subscriber churn, that need becomes more acute.”

She further pointed out that previously planners considered IMS as a service and not as a platform. Manjaro said that IMS supports multiple services and operators have started thinking differently regarding IMS.

IMS will have to integrate without disturbing existing services. Infrastructure vendors like Ericsson, Alcatel and Nokia (News - Alert)-Siemens have started implementing this. However they were previously adding IMS when upgrading networks for operators.

Manjaro continued, “It’s easier to quantify the opportunity for operators because you can look at it in terms of potential revenue. It’s more difficult with regard to vendors, because they’ve been bundling it with the air interface, the base station and the architecture upgrade.”

ABI research’s study titled IMS Core Networks: A Dynamic Service-Based Architecture explains regarding IMS activities in wireline and wireless access networks such as how operators are using IMS and its role in future network migration.