NEC Pitches Light IMS for Rural Apps

Rural telecom carriers in North America often face the dual challenges of an extended network topology and a limited economy of scale. These carriers also must consider their options for adding emerging services including VoIP, video distribution and remote health care to their existing telephony service.

An opportunity certain major carriers are pursuing is IMS as a platform to provide additional services. However, such a migration may be too complex right now for some rural service providers due to the need for routine updates and standards. A viable alternative for these carriers is Light IMS.

Light IMS allows operators to leverage their investments in VoIP and broadband services that will follow the adoption of xDSL and other next-generation network access services. Until recently, rollouts of xDSL have been characterized by slow starts followed by frenetic growth and expansion before maturation. Light IMS specifically is designed to suit this market characteristic. Its small-start approach means new business opportunities can be invested in with less risk and the ability to scale up quickly as the market expands. Further, the solution’s blade server architecture ensures investment is made without waste — only where and when it is needed.

A SIP server solution, Light IMS focuses on core voice services in combination with other media services, rather than replicating legacy telephony services.

Key elements of Light IMS include the SIP server platform, the blade system and the Light IMS software.

The SIP server platform is implemented on a carrier-class blade system that supports Internet Engineering Task Force-based SIP and cooperates with the SIP server to provide various subscriber services. The different services supported by multiple application servers can be combined to create a new service, which can generate new business opportunities. Additionally, the platform uses the operations and maintenance (O&M) server to implement basic O&M functions, such as subscriber management, operation management and billing mediation.

The blade system is designed for flexible configuration by the removal of blades to meet the system’s usage rate, and the proper planning of a suitable expansion schedule further improves the efficiency of capex. It is configured to offer high reliability through redundant configuration and utilizes centralized management to integrate multiple functions into one enclosure. These design functions streamline the O&M work and contribute to the overall improvement of system availability.

The server blade component software includes functions for the SIP server and various application servers. With regards to standard configuration, SIP server, Media Resource Application Server (MR-AS), Call Control Application Server (CC-AS), Web Service Gateway (WS-GW) and Application Subscriber Database (AS-DB) are included.

Convergence opportunities offered by Light IMS are acknowledged by experts in the field. "NEC's Light IMS platform bridges multiple types of voice and data services, enabling operators the opportunity to increase revenues by developing and deploying a variety of new revenue-generating services," said Stéphane Téral, principal analyst at Infonetics Research. "NEC's Light IMS product line-up is built on telecom industry standards, enabling operators to implement NEC's network technologies to effectively deliver new multimedia communication services."

Two new services announced at NXTcomm08 that add to the growing list of Light IMS’ key applications are home monitoring and UC Centrex. Essentially, both services can transform operators’ revenue structures with their ability to deliver new service propositions to end users.

Home monitoring for the residential market is a service offering where end users receive customized home security updates on any IP-enabled device. The seamless convergence of wireless/wireline access and an end-user's home monitoring service allows the IP network to carry information to the end-user device, informing them of a potential security breach. As the network and services are all SIP-based, operators rapidly can roll out these highly scalable service offerings that work in a device-agnostic environment.

For business customers, UC Centrex service is a VoIP-driven solution that offers end users value-added enterprise-ready telephony services in a carrier-hosted environment. Premium services include social networking, dynamic conferencing, click-to-call and voice recording, among others. Additionally, as part of the UC Centrex platform, Light IMS enables carriers to offer business users a Web universal communications service, allowing multiple sites to share documents by using a Web browser and a regular telephone set — and no need for special client devices.

Rural telecom carriers recognize convergence and new service deployment as two of the most important trends in service enhancement. The ability to migrate their networks and to offer new services are vital issues that are addressed by Light IMS.

Nick Satomi is vice president, NEC Corp. of America, Carrier Solutions. He can be reached at Nick.Satomi@necam.com. NEC Corp. of America is a subsidiary of NEC Corp.(TYO: 6701)

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