[Sagi Subocki, our Product Management Director for everything IMS. He just came back from the IMS World Forum and is also preparing a webinar about VoLTE. Here are a few insights from the past few days that he had.]
Well, as I am now back from the Annual IMS World Forum event, I can honestly say that this was one of the more exciting IMS events I have been to in the recent years.
No question that there is a surge of interest in IMS. No wonder – LTE is here.LTE deployments are already a reality, and there is a full understanding in the market that the only way to fully reap the potential of LTE is with IMS. I believe that this is why the VoLTE initiative got so much attention during the conference.
But another interesting undercurrent, if not “majorcurrent”, was the sense of concern in the telecom industry from Over-The-Top (OTT) Services. OTT Services even today, in the pre-LTE era, are showing their marks on the incumbent service providers. Voice, video, messaging and many more services are available for free from OTT players and leaving the operators struggling to find ways to overcome this challenge. And now, with the promise of LTE bringing high bandwidth, low latency mobile communications, the concern from OTT services is at a peak.
Operators, however, have many advantages over OTT providers: They control the network, they have direct access to the customers, they have full information of the customers, they know how to bill these customers and customers trust the operators (at least most of the time). The operators understand that and are bringing to the market new services of their own, or collaborations with OTTs, which far exceed the traditional voice and SMS services, utilizing the capabilities of IMS based VoLTE and RCS technologies.
Personally I think this is good for the industry, as this makes the operators and vendors think out of the box to bring in new services that eventually will benefit the consumers. With the LTE/VoLTE revolution just around the corner, we will soon experience it firsthand.
Join Sagi Subocki and Sagee Ben-Zedeff on May 5th for a free webinar on “Realizing the VoLTE Revolution” where they will discuss the future of voice, video, and much more in the LTE era. Registration is now open.
