It was a no-brainer to assume that shortly after Cingular announced it would use Lucent Technologies' IP multimedia subsystem architecture, an SBC Communications or BellSouth announcement couldn't be far behind. After all, isn't the whole idea to meld the functionality of the access networks in order to create, support and provide converged services? Why would parent and child drive different cars?

Now that SBC has acknowledged that it, too, will deploy a Lucent IMS architecture, it should be a no-brainer that BellSouth will follow suit. Do they even need to make an announcement?

Lucent probably thinks so simply for the positive ink. But really, other than confirming that the industry is serious about moving to an IMS architecture, which we already know, of what value are these announcements when they come with such scant detail about which elements will get deployed and when?

So what is Lucent actually providing in the way of IMS? We'll have to wait and see. What does that leave for everyone else? We'll have to wait and see. What sometimes gets lost in the IMS hype is that this wait-and-see period could take 10 years or more as elements of IMS are gradually worked into the network and work side-by-side with existing elements. It will be difficult at any specific point in time for a carrier to say they are 100% IMS. Taking the measure of progress in IMS deployments will be, as Heraclitus said, like trying to step into the same river twice (he thought the river--and everything else for that matter--was constantly changing and thus never the same.)

All we really know is that when Lucent and other hardware folks talk about IMS, it is generally a discussion about IMS at the network layer and below. And it is in this we see that IMS is no monolith. It's not like Lucent will be dropping in a bunch of $5 million dollar Class 5 switches. Heck, even those switches, as big as they were (so long, old paint!) were not monolithic. They weren't the end-all and be-all of the network. There was also signaling and trunking and multiplexing and power and interconnection and databases and, oh yeah, this whole OSS/BSS thing that no carrier likes to talk about.

As BellSouth CTO Bill Smith said in a recent Telephony article on the next-generation network, "IMS is an incredibly important ingredient, but it's not the entire NGN framework."

There will be plenty of opportunity for IMS deployments in the rest of the NGN framework, like at the service layer. You just won't hear much about them. To carriers, it's where differentiation occurs. And where differentiation is concerned, viewer discretion is applied.

E-mail me at tmcelligott@primediabusiness.com.