AT&T and Video Share
June 21, 2007
I totally missed this one!
I’ve been to NXTcomm. I sniffed around. I searched for IMS. I came back empty handed.
But then – AT&T actually announced their Video Sharing service during the show. And on the same day I was there…
I first found out about it in MobileCrunch blog – good I’m reading others. Two days after it was posted there, my Google alerts went jiggling happily about this service. It’s so good to know that operators are going to offer Video Sharing as their first IMS service.
To those of you who don’t know what Video Sharing is and those who would like to understand what can be done with this technology, AT&T were kind enough to have some mockup demos in their site – they’re quite good.
The interesting this is that they will be doing that over their WCDMA network and not CDMA2000 EV-DO one. The reason for that is the way these two technologies differ from one another.
In WCDMA, you can utilize both the circuit switched and the packet switched networks at the same time. This means that you can do an audio call over the circuit switched connection (as it is done for every audio call today), and then you add the video over the packet switched network (the data capability of the network).
But in EV-DO, this is impossible. You either do voice calls over circuit switching or data of some kind which would be packet based. So to do Video Sharing over EV-DO would require doing the voice over IP as well – and that’s a whole different ballgame.
So Video Sharing it is.
Let’s see which operators jump on this one next.
Additional coverage - Wired News, AT&T Site
Technorati Tags: NXTcomm, Video Sharing, IMS, Tsahi Levent-Levi
.
NXTcomm and IMS
June 21, 2007
This week I had a business trip. As part of my day job, I joined a panel discussing the IPTV experience at NXTcomm. While there, I had the time to walk around the show floor and see what companies are doing.
I can definitely say that this year, the main theme of NXTcomm is IPTV.
The second coolest acronym in the show was IMS.
First question out there, is what does IPTV has to do with IMS? Probably everything and nothing at the same time… But I’ll be leaving this one to a future post sometime.
What I really want to discuss here is still IMS.
Walking the floor and talking to companies in NXTcomm means you are meeting a lot of sales people from different companies. So IMS is what I do here, and I decided to go check what these people know of the IMS offering of their companies (you know – it’s not that easy).
Here’s a short roundup of the answers I got:
- “It’s essentially SIP”
- “We’re doing SIP, connecting it with Alcatel-Lucent’s thing, and we support IMS this way”
- “We’re IMS-ready” (heard that one before)
So nobody really knows what IMS exactly is there and don’t know how to chew it. Hopefully, this will change with time… especially when they all have IMS written all over their booth…
Technorati Tags: NXTcomm, IMS, IPTV, SigComp, Tsahi Levent-Levi
.
