Verizon, Cisco, Lucent Technologies, Motorola, Nortel and Qualcomm along with key telecom industry suppliers, today announced a vision for the advancement of next-generation network architecture for wireless mobile telecommunications networks. Their goal has been to develop enhancements to a well known, emerging architecture, known as IMS (IP Multi-media Subsystem). 

The multi-vendor team has generically termed this architecture A-IMS – for Advances to IMS -- in order to reflect its evolution from work done earlier in technology standards bodies.   The A-IMS architecture developed by the task force provides solutions to implement next-generation services in current networks, as well as creates a foundation for the efficient roll-out of both SIP- and non-SIP-based services in future networks. 

When I first heard about A-IMS and the taskforces "extensions" to the IMS standard, I couldn't help but be reminded of Microsoft making extensions to their browser that broke industry standards and fractured the browser market.  IMS is accepted as a core component of virtually all next-generation, IP-based communications networks for SIP-based applications, and is designed to assure standardization of multi-media services across all of these interconnected networks. So it is critical that any improvements made by the A-IMS initiative is rolled into the IMS standard.

I listened to the conference call and they claim that these "extensions" to the IMS standard will be put forth to the appropriate standards bodies. They pointed out that the response from the market has been positive and that the goal is not to cause a schism in the standard but instead to help bring more security, interoperability and stronger features.

Additionally, on the conference call Dick Lynch, Executive Vice President and CTO of Verizon Wireless pointed out that Verizon has been in discussion with other carriers and the goal is to make this a standard implemented wordwide and not just something for Verizon.