UMA and IMS in San Diego

The IMS Expo, held in conjunction with the Internet Telephony show in San Diego last week, featured a panel titled “The Role of UMA and IMS in Converged Networks”. It was a full panel, with 5 speakers scheduled for just 45 minutes. But moderator Michael Khalilian from the IMS Forum kept things moving.

With presentations from Stoke, Hellosoft, Azaire, Infineon and Kineto, the panel had a solid cross section of views and approaches to convergence networks. Yet from a UMA perspective, the panel was quite open to UMA.

Kineto, of course, focused on how UMA and IMS are complementary technologies. The presentation also covered how UMA can be used to provide mobility for IMS data applications today.

Infineon focused on how UMA can be used to deliver fixed line VoIP services with new UMA-enabled terminal adaptors.

Azaire commented on how their solution provides security across the spectrum of approaches for IMS to UMA.

Hellosoft presented architecturally how their client works showing how similar UMA and their IMS/VCC client. In fact, the presenter made a point of showing that IMS applications would easily run over a UMA transport layer.

Stoke rounded out the presentations by discussing their feedback from carriers on IMS applications and the role UMA-enabled handsets may play in the future.

For their part, the IMS Forum talked about their work in standardizing FMC within IMS and some of the challenges with the standard currently in development known as VCC.

While traffic on the fourth/last day of any show is bound to be light, the IMS Expo overall was a great success. The organizers saw the value of bringing together UMA and IMS technologies together to make a strong statement to the industry.

With any luck, we’ll get to do it again at IMS Expo 2007.