Friday, October 21, 2005

Wireless Carriers Are Getting on the IMS Bandwagon

Lucent’s IMS recent win at Cingular and Sprint Nextel’s announcement that they will be deploying IMS and working with Avaya for enterprise VoIP integration is an indication that they are clearly moving into the business voice market. It appears that their first stage is to provide the middleware and infrastructure to blend services on the wireless side. Existing wireline services will be integrated though gateways. The next step is to move into delivering services completely over IP right into businesses. Then they can displace incumbent carriers. Look for those announcements early next year once they become comfortable with their IMS software deployments. Sprint is the most aggressive since their wireline business is small compared to the other carriers with RBOC ownership. They have more to gain by displacing the RBOC. The question is whether one of these wireless carriers will purchase Vonage in the mean time. Stay tuned….

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