When defending the case for IMS, QoS is often mentioned. When defending the case against IMS, namely that the Internet already exists (so why bother with IMS?) QoS is brushed aside as a marginal benefit. One dismissal of QoS is based on the “good enough” argument, which claims that fat pipes abound means that QoS is almost a non issue, or an unnecessary expense and complication over and above just fattening the pipes.
If we all lived in the USA, or other select locations, perhaps fat pipes everywhere means that QoS really is marginal. But, we don’t all live in network utopia - not yet, anyway. When I Google-Talk to my brother in the UK (from the UK), the service is fantastic. When I Google-Talked today to someone in Asia, the service was patchy. According to a colleague well versed in inter-operator connectivity in Europe (which includes all those newly adopted Eastern nations), the “good enough” connection argument doesn’t hold, never mind parts of Asia and most of Africa. It seems that until the planet is illuminated by giga fibre everywhere, QoS matters. Admittedly, that isn’t a convincing argument for IMS, but it is a benefit.
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Today’s Independent newspaper (UK) has an article on the Ebay purchase of Skype. The journalist refers to these two businesses as clubs. People download Skype in order to talk to each other for free, especially over long distances (internationally). This doesn’t constitute a club, unless, as is common these days, the word has been given a new meaning, like “community” (yesterday’s buzzword for loosely associated people doing the same thing). I drink green tea. Does that put me in the “green tea club” or “green tea community”?
The problem with these descriptions is the tendency to add meaning where there isn’t any and so send us all off on another meaningless pursuit of abstract business ideas like “club value”. I can imagine it now; the VC retort “yes, but what’s the club value?”
The skype user base is, as far as online businesses go, a large one. Clearly, Ebay has acquired a potentially large and lucrative extension to its core auctioning business. Now, if I were Ebay, I would be thinking about how can I improve my core business, as well as extend it. Adding voice connectivity - and presence - to the Ebay auctioning process seems like a good idea. Clearly, Ebay users need to communicate with each other often, for a variety of reasons. Adding a real-time element, for free, has a lot of potential for enhancing the process. One could even conceive of new auctioning processes involving live presence in an auction room and bidding by voice. Ebay probably already has a good idea that introducing real-time user interaction via voice has a positive impact on auctioning. Buying the technology enables them to integrate it into their core business, as opposed to being an incidental component. In the long term, I also think that this will enable them to move successfully into the mobile arena, which will also have a positive impact on revenue by allowing bidders to actively participate in the closing of an auction.
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I’m currently analysing the major IM standards (XMPP, IMPS, SIMPLE) in order to understand levels of interoperability (gateways permitting). It’s hard to keep switching from OMA specs to IETF specs. They’re very different in form and format. My head is sore…
On top of which, today I participated in a seminar to understand the generic IMS Application Server platform offered by Ubiquity. Their product is very interesting and exciting. It allows for rapid creation and deployment of IMS AS applications using Java. The whole approach is very similar to Web programming except that one has to grasp SIP call flows and IMS service models, which are more complex than HTTP message flows.
Ubiquity’s product comes with a number of service modules (I forget the correct terminology), including Instant Messaging and Presence (although it is not a Presence Server out of the box). It seems a straightforward process to build an IMS service that integrates into a presence and IM environment within a wider set of IMS presence-enabled services.
The emergence of SIP as a major applications “tool” in the IMS world is worthy of detailed explanation from a software/services perspective, as opposed to the common telecoms-biased treatment. Certainly, I should add a chapter (at least) on this to any revision of my “Next Generation Wireless Applications” book.
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