While Cingular Wireless, Sprint and other mobile carriers around the world have long spoken of their intentions and goals for deploying IP Multimedia Subsystem architecture, Verizon Wireless—and other units of its corporate parent, for that matter—stayed relatively quiet, not even publicly committing to trials or naming vendors.

The company’s proposed Advances to IMS (A-IMS) architectural document breaks that silence and provides some long-awaited and how Verizon Wireless and its sister companies may deploy IMS.

“For Verizon and Verizon Wireless both, this announcement breaks a long silence on the subject of IMS,” wrote Tom Valovic, program director for VoIP infrastructure at consulting firm IDC, in a report analyzing A-IMS. “To date, in the US market, Sprint and AT&T have been the most proactive of US carriers in terms of revealing IMS plans. Verizon's long-standing influence over infrastructure and applications vendors – partly through its pocketbook and partly through its technology strategies—makes this announcement significant.”

Dick Lynch, executive vice president and chief technical officer, said in announcing A-IMS that Verizon Wireless and technologists from some of its suppliers, including Lucent Technologies, Cisco Systems, Motorola, Nortel Networks and Qualcomm, had been working on the concept behind closed doors for the last year.

Answering a question he himself proposed during Thursday’s press conference, Lynch said Verizon Wireless and its partners didn’t make more noise earlier about the project because of the need for their work to produce a single, comprehensive vision of how the IMS standard need to evolve.

“The vision needed to be articulated in one place at one time rather than piece-parted, as happens sometimes with standards,” Lynch said. “The whole picture needed to come together. Now, we’re asking for review, comment and quite frankly, any improvements to this architecture, from the rest of the industry.”

Lynch said that other carriers and vendors have been informed about the intentions of IMS. They’re already well aware of what we’re doing, and we’ve had good response from them,” Lynch said. However, the FierceWireless industry monitoring service reported just this afternoon that a Cingular Wireless spokesman said that company doesn’t completely agree with some aspects of the A-IMS approach.

Lynch also said the entire “Verizon family” had engaged in discussion and debate about the project as it progressed. He said Verizon Wireless will trial and deploy some A-IMS enhancements over the next 12 to 18 month. No other Verizon units to this point have publicly announced any IMS deployment plans. Meanwhile, Cingular has said that it’s planning to launch some services that leverage the IMS standard later this year, and also has publicly discussed how its IMS strategy will be integrated with that of its corporate parents, AT&T and BellSouth, whose merger is pending.