Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson and Nokia Siemens top the list of top IMS equipment manufacturers, according to a new study by Infonetics Research. The study, which surveyed service providers in Asia Pacific, Europe, Latin America and North America, found that about 75% of service providers plan to offer fixed VoIP over IMS by April 2009.
According to Stéphane Téral, principal analyst at Infonetics, as service providers accelerate their transition to VoIP to more efficiently compete, and as more of them experiment with new mobile and multimedia services, “IMS will be the glue that bridges their heterogeneous networks together and assures standardization of those services.”
The study also found that:
- Interoperability between different types of next-generation voice and IMS equipment was the only obstacle rated by more than half the respondents as a “strong barrier” to deploying IMS.
- Fixed mobile convergence topped the list of IMS services respondents wished to offer by 2009.
- 3GPP IMS leads the list of reference architectures respondents’ VoIP networks are based on.