Ericsson tests IMS in sub-Sahara Africa

Remmy Nweke who was in South Africa

GLobal telecommunications equipment manufacturer, Ericsson BA of Sweden, has commenced trials of its Internet Protocol Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), a soft switching industry standard infrastructure.

The IMS infrastructure, according to Ericsson’s Marketing Manager, Ms Lara van Rooyen facilitates the introduction of new data services using Internet Protocol (IP) in what she described as a common signaling protocol for all its services and tagged the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP).

Ericsson IMS, she said, is expected to take off strongly in Europe while trials have commenced in the sub-Saharan Africa.

“It would soon take off strongly in Europe and already some trials are going on in sub-Saharan Africa,” she affirmed.

Ms Rooyen said that deployment of IMS would offer an advanced package of value proposition from what is obtainable today from the Global System for Mobile communications (GSM).

She also said that the latest infrastructure from Ericsson brings to the market place an end-to-end interaction enabling the switching on of several value chains for the operators and consumers too, even as it is access independent and could be deployed on the GSM, Global Packet Radio System (GPRS), Enhanced DGE, Wide Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA), CDMA 2000 as well as fixed broadband networks.

The marketing manager further described IMS as the next generation of networks that would enable networks to work together without hassles.

She noted that with IMS, it would become history for telecom operators to launch a new product with a distinct network infrastructure to drive it.

“Very importantly, end-users would be able to get more functions on every platform deploying this IMS, such as seeing it the caller is busy among others,” she said.

Above all, there are lots of synergy and less operators’ worry about options whenever they want to introduce new and more products on their platforms, but now they have the option of offering even better options at that.

“They would start to do things more interactively through the IP”, she said, stressing that it is more of interactive experience.

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