the role of IMS in MVNOs

Firstly we should distinguis between "hard MVNOs" owning the own Core infrastructure (softswitch, ims, application servers) and the basic "traffic resellers".
Our approach is about the opporunity for hard MVNOs (i.e: in Spain several MVNO are expected to become full MVNO as Euskaltel, ONO, R, because they are fixed communication companies moving to be converged).
Carriers from fixed world extending their range of services to converged/mobility have mass market users and enterprise/corporate customers, they have now the capability to attract them as a mobile customers as well. Typically IMS is an easy infrastructure to integrate ASP mode services or licensed, the ecosystem of providers is becoming important, and new use cases other than VoIP are appearing.

A full MVNOs could offer OMA PoC (push-to-talk) services to enterprise customers with commercial PoC servers with no full carrier grade dimensioning, they can provide new services based on IMS (as video-sharing applications) without investing huge amounts of money in CAPEX and being a platform to test real use of these solutions:

-without compromising the global revenue due a possible not studied cannibalization of other services as SMS (it is being feared by carriers to deploy PoC i.e.)
-study the real appliability of use cases and help to study the right billing model to extend them to residential customers.
-link mobile and fixed branches into a new model of converged customers paying private services, the services could even become hosted as ASP, increase loyalty and reduce churn.

The MVNO are newcomers in a mature market, their mobile branches should have a light staff structure and could be easily linked to sales objectives in current enterprise base of customers.

They have then a good opportunity if they are fast offering new services while incumbent mobile carriers have slower decission cycle to deploy new services because they have to estimate global impact.

Currently, Solaiemes is developing new use cases to be applied to enterprise and public services customers, they need IP connectivity in both mobile and fixed sides, and could be hosted directly by final customers, become ASP from the telecom provider, or use ASP from external provider and use mobile and fixed data connectivity from the carrier/MVNO.

our ConverG+LiveServe SIP/IMS solutions are described at:

http://www.solaiemes.com/index.php?id=11
http://www.solaiemes.com/index.php?id=13

an example is being displayed at the bottom of this blog.

Solaiemes is not only creating technology to create new mobile/converged use cases, is also offering consultancy to help MVNO and carriers to evaluate CAPEX/OPEX investment defining the needs and best options for core and services infrastructure adquisition.




Solaiemes Project :-)