Written by: Ulf Olsson

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In a previous article, we examined the concept of combinational services, describing how Ericsson believes the mobile communications industry can introduce multimedia services quickly and efficiently by combining the best properties of packet capabilities with established, highly tuned, circuit-switched voice services. We also promised to return to the topic to discuss the true, long-term target architecture for multimedia services.

This time, the defining quality is that all media components can be delivered over a unified IP infrastructure, including mobile networks. This changes how we create and deploy services as well as the nature of the IP networks themselves. Using evolving tools, we are able to unify fixed and mobile access to deliver services to end-users in a coherent, appealing and resource-efficient manner. End-users can thus experience a wide variety of high-quality content anywhere and at any time. This article discusses the market forces and technical opportunities that shape this new world.

Network vision?
The future communications network will treat all forms of access as equals: every service delivered over every access, and fully exploiting the benefits of respective technologies. This includes interoperability with legacy, fixed and wireless telephony. In particular, the network will deliver services over a unified control and media infrastructure that supports fixed access and all forms of wireless access. Interestingly, the distinction between fixed and mobile is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Many of today’s “fixed” phones are cordless; some mobile phones can use fixed infrastructure, for example, through unlicensed mobile access (UMA); and telephony is available as a PC application delivered over a wireless local area network (WLAN). Most significantly, mobile networks are rising to the challenge of delivering voice over IP (VoIP) all the way to the handset, using the 3GPP IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) as the delivery infrastructure. Therefore, the case for finding a simple, unified solution is growing stronger with each new day.

The role of the core network entails finding, authenticating, charging, and managing the end-user. “Finding” is the key concept, because the main mission of the network is to provide reachability to any service or person, regardless of which network they are connected to. The network also adapts, personalizes, and delivers content. The interplay between user, subscription, devices, bearers and media flows is extremely interesting, because this is where person-to-content (p2c) and person-to-person (p2p) services meet and meld. New approaches are being developed to fulfill the promise of new access technology without creating an unmanageable tangle of options and restrictions for the end-user. Therefore, the two key value propositions for the IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) are really enable and simplify.