IMS MMtel: Does Anyone Other Than Ericsson Care?

Dean Bubley submits: This may come as a surprise to you, but there is a 3GPP standard for a
"PSTN replacement" form of VoIP. Supposedly, it will enable both
fixed-line [TISPAN] and mobile operators to deploy a single,
bearer-independent telephony application that will supplant existing
circuit telephony and bring new revenues from its ability to blend
speech with video, messaging and other elements. It will be, allegedly,
the basis for Telephony 2.0. It's called IMS Multimedia Telephony, or more briefly, MMtel.
Ericsson
(ERIC) takes every opportunity to talk it up, insisting that it will drive IMS
business cases, be usable over everything from DSL to HSPA to LTE, will
help operators defend against 3rd-party VoIP, and may even itself be a
developer platform. But if you haven't heard of it before, I
wouldn't be at all surprised. Almost nobody has. I ask plenty of people
who should have heard of it - operator applications people,
interoperability bodies like the MSF who work on IMS interconnection, a
variety of SBC vendors, VoIP specialists, handset platform providers.
Almost universally, I get blank stares when I ask "what do you think of MMTel?". Complete Story »


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