Cingular Wireless today announced it has selected Lucent Technologies as the primary vendor for an IP multimedia subsystem architecture. The wireless provider will deploy Lucent’s call session control platform and home subscriber server that make up the heart of the architecture and potentially the Lucent-built gateways, gateway controllers and applications servers that round out the platform. Though a key technology supplier for the network, Lucent will not be the overarching systems integrator, a role Cingular has not yet assigned.

Cingular offered few specifics on how it would use the service-oriented architecture, saying only that it would allow the carrier to quickly develop and launch new personalized voice, video, data and multimedia applications. In previous interviews, however, Cingular has played down the impact of IMS in the network. Chief Technology Officer Kris Rinne has said that Cingular views IMS as augmenting technology, adding critical services to the network, but not the revolutionary network evolution many in the industry tout it as. Cingular in the past has also played down IMS’s potential for fixed/mobile convergence, though the carrier is reportedly working on a cellular/Wi-Fi platform similar to BT’s Bluephone.

For Lucent the deal is significant. Of the two major IMS deals announced in the U.S., Lucent has a major stake in both. Last year, Sprint awarded Lucent a major contract to supply the core platform for its own IMS architecture, though Ericsson was awarded the integration contract.Lucent vice president of applications strategy and marketing Sandip Mukerjee said that a major component of the agreement with Cingular is a contract with Lucent Worldwide Services, but Lucent will be primarily responsible for overseeing the integration of its own equipment into Cingular's UMTS/HSDPA core, not other vendors’.

Mukerjee said Lucent will begin deploying the first elements of the architecture this quarter, but the launch date of the services based on the platform is up to Cingular. Lucent will supply its Lucent Session Manager, the call session control function core, which acts as the architecture’s “traffic cop,” managing every connection and transaction on the network over SIP. Lucent will also provide Cingular with its new Unified Subscriber Data Server, which is essentially a renamed version of its Super Distributed Home Location Register, the central repository of all subscriber data that it has installed in other IMS deployments.

Beyond those critical core elements, Lucent said Cingular may opt to add other components, including its media gateways and gateway controller and a unified client portal called the Communications Manager, which integrates all communications features into a single user interface.