A Converged Gateway to Nortel’s IMS Suite

Las Vegas — Nortel announced the Wireless Mobility Gateway 6000 (WMG 6000), a new addition to its IP Multimedia Subsystems &nbspsuite that helps service providers offer personalized multimedia services across wireless, wireline or cable networks.

The WMG 6000, which supports 3GPP (IMS), 3GPP2 (MMD), Packet Cable 2.0 and TISPAN standards, lets service providers merge 3G wireless networks to improve communications for consumers and businesses.

Nortel said in a statement it expects the gateway to be available in the second half of 2006.

IMS is the latest hot convergence technology. It’s a standard architecture for mobile and fixed IP services. Telecom operators who offer voice and data in a single packet, switched network use IMS to offer multimedia services over the Internet.

The technology, aimed at the multi-billion-dollar market for communications infrastructure, is important because it breaks down the barriers erected by the multiple proprietary architectures sported by wireline, wireless and cable operators.

Nortel’s IMS play falls under its Converged Mobility strategy for providing presence and telephony features such as caller ID, call waiting, call hold, click-to-call, call screening and routing and SMS .

The company’s aim is to enable service providers to offer video calling, video conferencing, instant messaging and multimedia services from one device and one phone number.

Moreover, Nortel’s IMS play helps service providers to manage subscriber information across multiple access networks more effectively, resulting in one consolidated bill for subscribers.

The gateway was also demonstrated at the CTIA Wireless conference, where executives from Nortel, Ericcson, Alcatel, Cisco, Sprint Nextel and Level 3 Communications discussed the benefits of IMS and challenges facing the technology.

Alan Stoddard, general manager of carrier multimedia networks at Nortel, said during a panel discussion yesterday that Nortel expects fixed mobile convergence to be a major application target area for IMS.

“The true value of IMS is that it turns the network from being device-centric or connection-centric to being subscriber-centric,” Stoddard said.

“All of the applications that we talk about are dependent upon the user themselves and not the device or the connection to that network. That makes all of those services transportable from one domain to another, which is in essence the definition of fixed mobile convergence.”

Stoddard said operators, such as Orange and Vodafone are moving toward this trend. Vodafone Wednesday announced a reorganization to focus on converged and IP services to derive more revenue streams.