For anyone who thought that voice over LTE (VoLTE) was the only thing sustaining the case for IMS, the evidence from Informa’s IMS World Forum, which was held this week in Barcelona, would suggest otherwise.

Vendors and operators met in London to discuss business models and the future of Service Delivery Platforms (SDPs) and how these can help the latter increase revenues without growing organically. The topic of SDP has been evolving in parallel with IMS and in some cases their evolution is similar. While both have been referenced as a way to implement new services and generate new revenue streams, neither have reached critical mass and in most cases are regarded as a “utility” rather than a premium enabling technology.

Sybren van Bentum, head of product management at carrier services and value added service provider iBasis, talks about voice interconnection, signalling, and IMS.

Sponsored by Huawei

With the recent explosive growth of mobile broadband, operators are facing a range of new business and technology challenges to maintain profitability and prepare for an even brighter future for packet data services. The paper focuses on the impacts on mobile packet core networks of the various challenges. These include driving down CAPEX, reducing packet core OPEX, incorporating functionality supporting service aware business models, smooth evolution of core architectures to 4G, moving service & transport layer architectures towards All-IP & IMS, and transforming core and service layers to support relevant radio access standards.