Roberto Gavazzi, Client Area Manager, Innovation and engineering from Telecom Italia spoke about “IMS-like services,” since no IMS deployments exist today. Telecom Italia has sold or leased one million fixed video handsets. Uptake has been poor; Gavazzi’s assessment was that one million is not enough. He stated that the user experience was good, so that was apparently not the barrier. My take is that video calling, for whatever reason, is a complete turnoff for most people. Why spend more for someone to see your face?

Terrence Wong, Manager Technology Strategy, CTO Office, Telus Mobility in Canada spoke about the carrier perspective for IMS services. Telus has seen a jump in revenue percentage for data from 10% of $5.7B in Q2 2000 to 19% of $8.2B in Q1 2006. Voice dropped from 49% to 29%, and wireless jumped from 18% to 41%. Long distance, as one might expect, dropped considerably. He stated that having a seamless user experience between the different networks (wireless, wire line) provides not just the consumer, but the carrier with benefits. Having a multi-play strategy with a consistent UE enables single training for the support staff. Network security, client update & management, and service & billing were the key applications that Wong considered. Does that mean that my wire line phone gets configured the same way I configure the Wi-Fi on my laptop? I’m frightened by that idea.

Network policy is a consideration of IMS and MMD services, such as how to route calls. If a single number is utilized, when should the call go to home, work, mobile, or VOIP. My answer is that the policy should be transparent to the consumer. Have it go to all of those places, and have the call terminus be centralized to the network. In other words, ring everywhere, but take messages only at one place. Setting policy is a user interface that is cumbersome, hard to override, and difficult to support.

Service levels for VOIP promise to be varied and complicated to monitor. IMS treats voice as just another application, but for most telephony users, voice is the most important application. Guaranteeing levels of service implies more than providing credit for crappy, blocked, and dropped calls: it means providing a quality connection that doesn’t jitter or disconnect prematurely. It means providing comparable or higher quality than today’s cellular. However, the first years of IMS are likely to see voice degradation, a scary prospect: more expensive handsets that are bigger, crashy, and with poor battery life that also have low quality voice connections? Sounds like a train wreck: it can be seen from a long way away, but it can’t be stopped.

Moshe Fireman, Associate VP & Chief Architect of Comverse USA spoke about converged messaging. He spoke about the opportunity for improved usability. I think the unified mailbox is fantastic for reading messages. It breaks down when one creates messages: How does the consumer decide which channel to use for outbound content? It’s a usability logjam, since there are some constraints: SMS allows for 160 characters (unless compound SMS messages are sent). Emails can be any length, but they can be either plain text or HTML. Instant messages (IM) can be any length and they’re instant, but only if the recipient is online. MMS messages compete with email. Voice messaging competes with Push to Talk. In “competes” I mean that there are gray areas where more than one technology is appropriate, but the costs are different. My gut is that the right strategy is to have the user create the message and send using the most efficient protocol, but that strategy can lead to cost confusion, the bane of IMS services. Should replies use the same protocol, or should the handset or network optimize the delivery mechanism?

Moshe used personas to illustrate multi-modal communication. Patrick sends a message to Ann, who replies in a “conversation” mode, but then Patrick gets it as an SMS. He replies, and Ann sees it after she arrives at work on her computer. Sending video was of course included as an example. The IMS promise is all about technology enablement with usability challenges—the tech is much easier than the UI. Moshe spoke about the user being able to set his or her preferences for how messages get sent—policies again. I think the whole concept of policy setting by the consumer is Pandora’s Box.

In the Q&A I asked Moshe what the send strategy would be; he said that the user shouldn’t care and that the network should decide. I followed with the cost opacity issue: the network might automatically decide on the most expensive means! Moshe suggested a single-cost structure based on message size. I like that idea, as long as the messaging application indicates the total message size before it gets sent, much like SMS counters work today. Even better would be a cost counter.

Marc LeClerc, Manager, Global IMS Developer Support Expert Centre, Ericsson, Canada showed a video envisioning future IMS services in the car, and in the home. A family of mobile-addicted people used their mobiles and their TVs with IMS services, headphones, and interaction with each other and other devices through mobile communication. He showed a son requesting access to parental-protected content. He showed the same parent checking and sending messages while driving (!), and he showed the other parent using a touch screen television to check and send messages. All these technologies were actually quite humorous to me. This four-person traditional family was so tuned in to technology, having spent a considerable sum per person on equipment and service.

What were the advantages of IMS enablement?
1. The teenager was able to watch/listen to music videos on her handset, and then move the content to the big screen in the living room.
2. Mom was able to text message while on the road. This choice was curious… Dangerous and a strange use case, though increasingly popular.
3. Dad was cooking and using the kitchen TV as a messaging terminal.

Here were use cases:
- Mobile phone used as a DLNA home network device
- IMS enabled services on home network devices
- Remote access to home network content and media

What’s the UI to move music from the handset to another device?

Chris Steck, Director of Technology Strategy at RealNetworks USA spoke about IMS as the future entertainment platform. He spoke about the carriers’ concern that IMS breaks the walled garden—that’s a nice irony, since he was able to reassure them that IMS enables the monetization of every service separately. Really evil carriers will bill for time, data quantity, AND services, the triple dip! But seriously, let’s hope that individual services will be billed, and data minutes and data quantity will be billing history. He spoke about rights management.

Chris’ presentation ultimately positioned RealNetworks as the arbiter of digital rights. Since Qualcomm, Microsoft, and the others weren’t talking about rights management, he deserves plaudits. He brought up peer to peer (P2P) as a use case. IMS enables the tech, but it’ll be up to the carriers to control access. Carriers will need a digital rights management partner to assist with the policies and UE. Real has a “share the love” credits concept that encourages media sharing, but the shared media is encased in an advertising wrapper. Enough sharing gives the sender the rights to watch the content without ads. His concept was that popular media generates more ad serving revenue than unpopular content.

The IMS technical problems are considerable, but the overall user experience is the true challenge: pricing, marketing, billing.