The IMS standardization process started nine years ago with an initiative from AT&T Wireless and British Telecom, and Ericsson was engaged from the start.

Jörgen Lantto is currently head of systems management at the Ericsson business unit Multimedia where securing the establishment of IMS services is a priority. But in 1999 he was employed by Northstream, which was heavily involved with a new all-IP standard that later became IMS.

He says: "It all started when a major operator in North America decided to go for GSM. Initially they did not want to deploy a new GSM circuit switched network; instead they wanted to deploy a common IP-based network for both data and voice. So initially the main driver was to create a mobile standard for VoIP over 3G and EDGE. Ericsson, Lucent and other players in the market then started a joint collaboration to set a common standard, called 3G.IP."

The work in 3G.IP was soon transferred to 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project), and in record time the IMS architecture was agreed upon in 3GPP. At this time the industry had agreed that the standard should not only support VoIP but also multimedia services based on IP. And so the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) was founded.

Since then the work with IMS has continued to progress. But to create a system that supports multimedia services both within the mobile and the wireline networks, regardless of the terminal used, has been a bigger challenge for the industry than simply creating a standard. Ericsson has put a lot of effort into making all these pieces come together - the standard, customer needs, technical challenges in mobile and fixed networks, and new services.

The most popular IMS services have been Voice over IP and IP Centrex solutions, mainly for broadband operators. But by the end of last year, SoftBank, launched a commercial IMS offering in Japan using Ericsson's IMS system. With the help of Yahoo!, the operator's subscribers now have a mobile community, with the chance to chat and to enter a virtual world.

Lantto says: "I think we will see many more mobile communities coming, and the next step will be IPTV. The future will be an all-communicating world, where all services, TV, mail, chat, phone calls, surfing - whatever you need - should be accessible regardless of your terminal. IMS can make that happen, and at the same time, provide for business solutions so the operators can have control of the services provided by their networks."

Lantto adds: "It is a challenge to create ecosystems to make this work. Within the next year, there will be more terminals supporting the standard. We are now working on a set of services that we call Multimedia Communications Suite, MCS, and feedback from both terminal vendors and operators is very positive. Ericsson has taken a leading role also in this work, once again in close collaboration with the operators."