The MultiService Forum will stage a global interoperability test of the physical architecture it developed for IP multimedia subsystem compatibility in October of this year, the group announced today. One primary goal of the complex testing process is to speed the practical deployment of IMS.

For the first time, Verizon is participating as one U.S. host of the global interoperability demo, along with the University of New Hampshire’s Interoperability Lab. BT, Vodafone, NTT and Korea Telecom are the other participants for GMI 2006, which will take place Oct. 16-27.

MSF’s work is focused on “the practicalities of IMS implementation and the interoperability of different networks,” said Roger Ward, CTO of British Telecom and president of the MSF.

That work is becoming more crucial to service providers as concerns grow about the viability of IMS, said Joe McGarvey, senior analyst with Current Analysis.

“There is a growing segment of the Internet community that is beginning to characterize IMS as an expensive overlay that is only designed to enable service providers to charge more,” McGarvey said. “IMS has to deliver added value beyond basic services--it has to offer services that [customers] will find worthwhile and worth paying for.”

Through its previous work, MSF developed a reference architecture, MSF R3, that enables implementation of IMS functions spelled out by the 3GPP, and the upcoming GMI 2006 will seek to validate MSF R3 Implementation Agreements covering a number of key functions. Those include roaming across multiple networks, quality of service using session border controllers and bandwidth managers, 3GPP IMS and Mobile Core Network Interoperability, third-party applications and service brokering, and interworking of IP4 and IP 6.

For the first time, MSF is also addressing network management, in conjunction with the TeleManagement Forum, Ward said.

“This is unique to GMI 2006 -- we are also tackling management and provisioning of service and VPNs and simple fault management,” he said.

The six testing scenarios include supporting nomadic subscribers; delivering value-added services to nomadic subscribers; IMS interconnection between MSF R3 networks and ‘pure’ IMS networks; roaming between MSF R3 and IMS networks, and management of multi-technology VPN sites.

Verizon plans to support the full range of its services, both enterprise and residential, on an IMS architecture, and will like to see the process moving ahead with some speed, said Naseem Khan, distinguished member of technical staff at Verizon Labs.

“In terms of implementation, it is very important to understand what is vital from a services perspective, which bits and pieces are important to implementation,” he said. “We are doing internal testing and GMI will supplement that effort and allow the industry to move forward more quickly.”