NTT: one of the biggest IMS & PoC deployment so far

Over the last years NTT has deployed more than 30 million of PoC handsets in its advanced 3G FOMA network. The service was launched as "PushTalk" in late 2005. Now, 30 million handsets is a small fraction of the market but a significant number compared to the tiny deployments made so far.

Service relies on NEC IMS core, technical details are not clear, but we can safely bet this is the biggest mobile IMS deployment so far. PoC or PTT are terms not mentioned by NTT, perhaps they are using a proprietary, IMS-based, protocol.

The basic service includes group calls up to 5 participants, for larger groups an additional service must be contracted (PushTalk Plus), aimed at enterprises. Service is billed per push (0,03€ per push) and there is a flat rate (Kake-Hodai) service for 6,45€ per month.
PushTalk Plus service, including group calls up to 20 members, is 12,9€ per month.

And a very interesting detail: Service is activated by default in every handset for every subscriber. I don't know the reason for that, but one very important consequence: you needn't to know in advance if the person you want to call has the service or not: everybody "is in the service". And the person receiving the call will probably answer back. This scheme encourages service spreading from a small number of knowledgeable users to the rest. From my point of view, this is much better than waiting for the subscribers to ask for activation, or trying to communicate with other subscribers only to find that they are not subscribed.

Japan is a very innovative market, we are looking forward to reading some data about service usage, would that be a test of things to come?

Let's talk about handsets

Disclaimer: this is a personal view, in Solaiemes we have team members worshipping the IPhone, and perhaps they are no sharing my point of view :-)

Now, let's talk about handsets as mobility tools. Everybody is waiting impatient the 3G iPhone, of course, it is a very nice handset, with lot of capabilities, Apple design, and proper marketing, obviously Solaiemes will try to squeeze its capabilities to deliver more mobility use cases experiencies.
Once said that, now, I want to help people realizing that a lot of powerful use cases are not needing iPhone, and perhaps other devices have advantadges. iPhone has a powerful browser and a lot of mobile solutions could be done base on rich web using AJAX, it is a fact, but for multimedia mobile use cases, related with infrastructure, all is still to be done.
Nokia is including by default as "out the box" features Push to Talk, VideoShare (see what i see), etc...
Other device manufacturers as Motorola, Samsung, SonyEricsson, have the same features developed but are no enabled in the SW right now in most of countries, we encourage them to enable the features and help the ecosystem to make this features a powerful ARPU generator for carriers, and a powerful "satisfaction" generator for their customers. With PTT and VideoShare you have real mobile experiences and new capabilities about being conected, alerted, sharing live media, multimodal usability. All these capabilities enable competition vs iPhone strengths: mobile browser, ipod-mobile, high tier conected PDA.

Solaiemes focuses on empowering the mid-tier devices, the largest market size in western countries to enable from network application specific infrastructure the same or even more multimedia and usability performance of high tier devices, and will help people with mid tier devices not envying iPhone users :-)

juan

Carrier's desperation driving IMS ??? Not the best approach ...

Heavy Reading has just published a report on IMS status in carriers. "IMS Deployment Update: Promise & Challenges" (executive summary here). It shows that two perceptions I have already heard elsewhere are really quite widespread:

First (quoting from TMCnet), one of the conclusions from the report's author: "After several years of unvarnished hype, IMS has moved from hero to zero faster than the average telco panacea [...] IMS is a dying issue."

But, strinkingly, operator representatives also admit to be "struggling to find a position in the Web 2.0 world," and that "we don't see any other way to go but IMS."

On one hand we see that there is some perception that IMS is not only going down the hype curve, but actually dying. This is somehow expected. It will take some time to overcome all the issues of an over-hyped, very complex and new technology. And it remains to be seen how different will be what it is now IMS (in specs and drawing boards) from the result of that distillation process.

On the other hand, the carriers are desperate to embrace IMS' promise. But are they adding the non-technical components that are needed to make it a success? I am talking about imagination here. Migrating existing services to IMS will not provide much benefit, market needs imaginative services, but there is no much creativity yet. New services (like PoC) are not launched because of concerns about cannibalisation or revenue erosion ... Why not create new business models (such as PoC person-to-machine / machine-to-person, etc)? Risk is negligible for carriers, and much better than desperation anyway.

Following a long tradition, operators are turning to vendors to provide some "mojo", but incumbents suppliers are also worried about erosion of established businesses. Startups are more likely to provide the innovation the market needs.

Are rational the carrier concerns about PoC? (II). What Solaiemes is doing.

Currently Solaiemes is working in several compelling use cases mobile-to-server with added value use case and no possible SMS or Voice Call cannibalization. We are focused on man-machine interaction to make normal life actions easier with low additional cost for user combined with revenue increase for carrier.
The point is that it is needed a commercial OMA PoC commercial service offered by local carrier to get advantadges of new use cases.

(spanish)
Actualmente Solaiemes está trabajando en la creación de casos de uso para el OMA push to talk (push over cellular) basados en la interacción hombre-máquina (sin posibilidad de canibalización de llamadas vocales y/o SMS) y que permitan simplificar muchas de las tareas diarias por muy bajo coste para el usuario, pero un ingreso agregado para el operador móvil.
Eso sí, necesitamos que se lancen ya los servicios comerciales de OMA PoC en España y los países de nuestro entorno.

juan mateu

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 :-)