Where do we go from here? 3G-324M and IMS Video Share Technologies

The developers I work with are back from an interoperability event held by the IMTC. They tested there 3G-324M and IMS Video Share technologies to make sure our products are interoperable. What are the insights from these events?

3G-324M

Today, 3G-324M is a stable technology available in almost every 3G handset in Europe and Asia. It is stable, interoperable and working - between different handset vendors, against multiple servers, and through roaming services around the world. There are, however, two new aspects of it that are currently being tackled by developers - MONA and H.264.

• MONA is a set of techniques used to reduce call setup time (you can read a whitepaper about it). Over the past year, we have seen an advance in the stability of its implementation by vendors. Most of the vendors implementing it nowadays have solutions with a relatively good level on interoperability. The next level would be to test it against commercial handsets that support MONA - once they are out.
• H.264 is a video codec that gives improved quality over the video codecs used in 3G-324M up until now. The only problem is that it requires a lot more CPU - something that becomes available as time goes by. When we started testing H.264 in 3G-324M about a year ago - we had only one or two companies to test against. This time - almost everyone had it - it was quite refreshing to see.

I think we will see these two technologies penetrate commercial deployments somewhere in the second half of 2008 - we have a long way to go yet, but that’s how open standards work.

IMS Video Share

This is a totally different story. Video share is one of the first IMS services to be deployed - AT&T has it available today to its customers to some extent (limited number of cities, specific handsets, etc). Part of the problem is due to the use of the SIP protocol, as Anatoli points out.

Judging by Ran’s experience in this interoperability event, I think we have a long way to go in the IMTC and in the industry before we get Video Share as a service to the level required, but I am quite confident we will get there - it only takes time.

For this group, I feel that the next steps should be to finalize the test specification document and to discuss all of those nasty SIP headers and fields that companies can’t agree upon - otherwise, I see no way for the industry to advance on this one.