IMS for long distance carriers
Normally you would see IMS being pitched at the local incumbents. Belgacom International Carrier Services (BICS), however, chose IMS blueprint over the softswitch environment even when the cost of IMS implementation was higher. According to BICS, developing applications with softswitch environment would have cost them much more.
The service provider has already realized break even on the investment made in deploying IMS. It reached a break even point in just 10 months after deployment. On the CAPEX it saved 30% and the OPEX was remarkably lessened by 70%. And BICS says IMS stuff is green. Compared to the legacy switches and other infrastructure they saved around 20% in energy consumption which included power consumption of the actual equipment, ventilation and air conditioning of the place where the equipment is located.
BICS has stayed faithful to the IMS blueprint since mid 2006. It is a Class 4 environment with bridges between the legacy TDM protocols and new protocols including SIP. BICS is also offering ENUM services over the IMS architecture. More services are to come and they include location based services. Most local incumbents have been painfully slow with IMS because when you disrupt local networks, you disrupt a lot of services. On the other hand, long distance networks involve fewer features and network elements.
There could be another motivation for long distance carriers like BICS to migrate over to IMS quickly. With the changing telecom and datacom markets, long distance carriers are coming in competition with the local carriers who serve end users. Since voice, video and other services use IP backbones, the long distance carriers can also serve end users as they have the infrastructure laid. The only thing they need to add is the applications, which IMS makes easier.
