3Q 2009 • info@IMSForum.org • www.NGNForum.org • www.IMSForum.org

Dear NGN Forum Members and Colleagues,

Preparations are well under way for our eighth NGN and IMS Plugfest™ which will be held next week, October 5 thru October 9, 2009 at the InterOperability Lab (UNH IOL) in Durham, NH. Plugfest 8 participants and contributors will include: Comverse, HP, Mu Dynamics, NTT-AT, Radvision, Sonus, Tekelec, Tektronix, Testing Technology, US Government Communications Groups, Japan NICT (National Institute of Information and Communications Technology). Sponsors of Plugfest 8 include T-Mobile, Intel and Radvision. Media Sponsors include CTIA, GSMA, Informa, Supercomm 2009, TMC/NGN Magazine, and Virgo Publishing.

We will announce the results from our Plugfest 8 at Supercomm in a panel session on Wed, Oct. 21 4:15pm-5:00 pm, entitled: Exploration Theater Special Session#1: IMS Forum Presents: Results from Plugfest 8 - Interoperability for IP Applications & B/OSS and Charging in Converged IMS & NGN networks. Panelists will include senior executives from the IMS Forum Plugfest 8 participants. Please contact us if you are a registered Plugfest 8 participant and you would like to be on this panel.

The NGN and IMS Forum's Plugfests are the industry's only interoperability events covering NGN services over wireless 3G, 4G, LTE, WiMAX, wireline xDSL, cable, fiber optics broadband and IMS architectures. The IMS/NGN Forum Plugfest™ is the most frequent interoperability event in the industry. Plugfest 8 will mark another important milestone - setting the testing for interoperability testing for roaming and visiting subscribers.

Plugfest 8 will focus on Interoperability for voice and multimedia applications, IP BSS/OSS and Security inter and intra networks including the following:

• End-to-end interoperability testing for IMS and NGN applications and services
• Interoperability of the Control Plane and the Diameter Protocol
• Charging functions impacts on BSS

Examples of test topics for Plugfest 8 include:

• Application and Feature Testing across the Control Plane
• Online & offline charging (Billing) scenarios for IMS events and sessions
• Interface Compliance testing; The 3GPP standard interfaces that use Diameter
• Topology hiding scenarios; IMS/NGN Control Plane interoperability including border controllers, legacy network gateways, service location function, and policy control elements
• Multi-domain scenarios covering user-to-network and network-to-network IMS interoperability
• Further study of IPsec on the Gm interface
• Inclusion of IPv6 within the core network
• Reliability and Availability Network Security

The list of IMS/NGN services to be tested ALSO include: VoIP (RCS, MMTel and Centrex), IPTv (ATIS and ETSI), presence services, security, billing and OSS/BSS support. Test plans for Diameter and control plane are also offered.

Participation in NGN IMS Plugfests and Technical working Groups is open to all companies. We look forward to your participation in our Working Groups and in Plugfests. For more information please contact info@ngnforum.org or visit www.NGNForum.org, www.IMSForum.org.

Regards,

Michael Khalilian
Chairman and President
NGN Forum and IMS Forum

Market Research Corner

LTE's Five-Year Global Forecast: Poised to Grow Faster than 3G

The number of Long Term Evolution (LTE) subscriptions worldwide will grow at a Compound Average Growth Rate (CAGR) of 404 percent from 2010 to 2014, a pace faster than any previous mobile standard including 3G, according to the latest report from Pyramid Research (www.pyr.com), a telecom research subsidiary of the Light Reading Communications Network (www.lightreading.com).

LTE's Five-Year Global Forecast: Poised to Grow Faster than 3G identifies the main technical and business drivers, as well as the challenges for the LTE platform, and analyzes its market opportunity in comparison with earlier mobile technologies in their first few years of commercialization. The 19-page report provides Pyramid Research's five-year outlook on LTE adoption, highlighting the largest LTE markets, and comparing adoption rates in emerging and developed markets. It also examines the LTE-related products, demos, and announcements of six of the largest vendors worldwide, including an analysis of how they compare with one another in terms of time to market and customer wins.

For the first time, most of the major players, operators, and vendors alike, are behind the same mobile standard, notes Daniel Locke, analyst at Pyramid Research and author of the report. "By using LTE's more efficient and cost-effective flat IP architecture, mobile operators can transfer the savings to end users in the form of lower prices for access, faster data rates, and higher traffic allowances for a wider adoption of mobile data services," he says. "To date, 27 mobile operators worldwide have publicly committed to deploying LTE, with 12 of them expected to roll out commercial services in 2010 and the remainder during 2011 and 2012," he adds.

Pyramid expects LTE to grow more rapidly than preceding mobile standards in terms of subscriptions. "While it took nearly six years for UMTS/HSPA to reach 100 million subscriptions, Pyramid predicts that LTE will take just over four years to reach the same milestone," explains Locke. "The number of LTE subscriptions worldwide will grow at a CAGR of 404 percent from 2010 to 2014 and reach 136 million by year-end 2014," he says.

"The majority of LTE subscriptions in the early stage will come in developed markets, where most of the first LTE deployments will occur – with the US and Japan leading," Locke says. "However, LTE will grow 30 percent faster in emerging markets than developed ones; subscriptions in emerging markets will account for 43 percent of the LTE total in 2014, up from 5 percent in 2010," he adds. Fueled by vendor support of TDD-mode, growth in emerging markets will be driven largely by China with 36.1 million subscriptions in 2014.

For more information about Pyramid Research's products and services, please visit www.pyr.com.

NGN Forum Q & A

Q & A with Dave Kresse, CEO, Mu Dynamics

Please provide us with some brief background on your company?

Mu Dynamics’ testing solution boosts the effectiveness of testing IP services 10x with better time to market, lower cost and higher quality. The award-winning Mu Test Suite is deployed at more than 100 locations, primarily at leading global service providers, government agencies, and product vendors. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, more information on Mu’s products, customers and solutions are online at http://www.mudynamics.com.

What IMS and NGN services and products does your company offer today and what are some of the key differentiators for your company in this market? What are your future product plans?

Mu’s Test Suite provides the only adaptive testing solution on the market today. Both operators and vendors test their IP service development and deployments with the highest degree of quality and confidence. Key points of IMS/LTE/4G differentiation:

• Accurately reflecting the logic of complex, changing services
  
  • A single LTE service component is a complex system of protocol interactions, devices, sequences, etc.
  • To date, testing approaches for NGN deployments have gone after individual elements of a service, and not looked at the system-level requirements for testing the service.
  • Mu uniquely creates stateful testing of LTE-based services (e.g. location-based applications) and simulates real usage and unexpected requests on application data sets.

• Quickly drive multiple types of data through the service
  
  • Every NGN service is unique, custom and often changing based upon user and service parameters.
  • To date, testing solutions have used only vendor supplied content – nothing unique and custom that accurately reflects the NGN service offering.
  • Mu offers operators and vendors a test case choice of using Mu content, customer specific content, and third party content to provide the most accurate representation of the different variations of how a service is used.

• Leverage a single testing solution to enable multiple aspects of testing (functional, interoperability, security, resilience)
  
  • The NGN service needs to be tested along multiple dimensions.
  • To date, testing approaches often limited to transaction volume or load have used disparate tools to test a single testing aspect, which means lots of time, money spent with a disjointed results.
  • Mu allows customers to rapidly create a best fit test process once and leverage that across multiple testing types (e.g. vendors can create an IMS test suite to pass along to operator customers as a baseline for LTE service deployments).

How do the NGN and IMS Forum's Plugfests benefit your company and its customers?

Mu has participated in nearly every NGN/IMS Forum Plugfest and gained invaluable knowledge on the creation and deployment of real-time LTE and 4G planned service offerings. The Plugfest format offers Mu a real-world view on capturing actual service-level traffic on which to base our own content development efforts. As a result, both operator and vendor customers have access to LTE/4G pre-compiled test suites as well as the new ability to create their own test cases using the newest release of the Mu Test Suite.

How does a verification and certification process aid in the development of NGN and IMS interoperability/standards?

With the complexity of real-time 3G and IMS-based service offerings, operators and their vendors need to be assured that provisioned services perform as planned. The time to market requirements of products for the LTE/4G ecosystem necessitate that vendors produce solutions that work the first time in operator environments. Mu has actively worked in the verification and certification process with adaptive testing solutions that ensure reliable and secure products for operator customers.

Who are some of your customers and what NGN and IMS services are they deploying?

Publicly-referencable Mu Dynamics' customers include Cox, Juniper Networks, Starent, F5, Motorola, Ericsson-Redback, Veraz and Verizon. Mu is uniquely positioned to help our mix of 100 customers develop and deploy adaptive testing solutions for their NGN/IMS development and service deployment needs. Our customers are building some of the world's largest LTE and 4G service deployments. In fact, Mu customers represent the vast majority of North America's IP service development and service deployment offerings including many operators with bundled service offerings on the newest customer devices. The complex interactions between building and deploying IP services is a natural fit for Mu's testing solution.

What are some areas of NGN and IMS where you have found challenges for operators?

Every operator's deployment of NGN and IMS is unique, with most containing custom pieces. Because of this, Mu operator customers find it challenging to ensure that the services they are deploying will be of the highest quality with the best functionality, interoperability, reliability and security - taken together to ensure high service quality. The reality is that vendors are not delivering solutions that have been tested for the specific operator's specifications. Nor are they testing for all of their functionality, interoperability, resilience, and security needs.

Are there any other critical benchmarks that need to take place in this IMS NGN evolution?

Yes, vendors developing products for this fast growing market need to ensure their products are functionally sound, fully interoperable, and resilient in changing operator networks and secure against unexpected access. Since operator deployments of bundled LTE services are starting to roll out, the quality of the IP service to end customers will now increasingly be publicly tested. Ultimately users will vote with their wallets and average revenue per user (ARPU) will become a critical operator benchmark that trickles down to their vendor suppliers with new contracts.

What are some of the key factors for NGN and IMS success in the industry?

Mass adoption will only occur when end users are confident that the IP service they are accessing is functionally sound, interoperable, resilient, and secure. Whenever a new type of service is introduced by their operator, the initial focus is always on features/functionality. However, quality and user experience follow close behind and it is only when these two latter obstacles are addressed that mainstream LTE or 4G adoption occurs. When NGN and IMS operators and vendors embrace IP service testing as a critical aspect of their business to speed quality products and services to market, this adoption will occur.

To have your company considered for a profile in the Q & A section of this newsletter send an email to pr@ngnforum.org.

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NGN Forum Working Groups Update

Planning is well underway at the IMS Forum technical working groups, which have been holding regular joint sessions for the planning of Plugfest 8. The participants in the Diameter and Control plane Working Group together with the OSS/BSS and the Interoperability and Test Working Groups are meeting now every week with the participation of the three groups and the UNH IOL lab management.

The Diameter and Control plane interoperability group recently achieved an important milestone -the release of the complete test matrix and plan. The group was formed late last year and chaired by Bruno Deslandes (Marben-Products). Participants included Prof. Carol Davids at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and participants from companies such as Aricent, HP, Mu Dynamics, Radvision, Testing Tech, Wipro, and Data Connection Ltd.

The importance of Plugfest 8 cannot be underestimated. Together we will address some of the most challenging issues facing the progress of IMS in service provider networks: network-to-network interoperability, exercising the control plane along the Diameter interfaces and verifying that OSS/BSS with focus on billing and charging functions. That's a lot to do even for a forum with a track record of having the most frequent IMS/NGN interoperability events in the industry.

NGN Forum Calendar of Events

The NGN IMS Forum spoke and moderated panels at the following shows this Fall:

· Sept. 1-3: Internet Telephony Conference & Expo, Los Angeles, CA

· Sept. 1-3: ITExpo/4GWE, Los Angeles,.CA

· Sept. 15-18: 4G World, Chicago

· Sept. 21-23: VON Conference & Expo 2009, South Beach, FL

See the NGN/IMS Forum at the following events:

· October 5-9: IMS/NGN Plugfest 8, UNH-IOL, Durham, NH

· October 6-9: CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment 2009, San Diego, CA

· October 11-14: CompTel, Orlando, FL

· October 21 at 4:14 PM: Supercomm 2009, Chicago, IL - Exploration Theater Special Session#1: IMS Forum Presents: Results from Plugfest 8 - Interoperability for IP Applications & B/OSS and Charging in Converged IMS & NGN networks. Panel of Plugfest 8 participants.

· October 28-29: VoIP Conference & Expo, Illinois Institute of Technology, Wheaton, IL, IMS Forum President and Forum member executives to speak and review state of NGN telecom industry.

· October 25-30: Cable Connection, Denver, CO

Showcase Your Expertise and Leadership: Call for Speakers

The NGN Forum and IMS Forum invites members to join its exclusive Speakers' Bureau. Member companies have an excellent opportunity to market their companies and senior executives while representing the Forum at future trade shows and conferences. Simply contact us with a copy of the proposed speaker's bio and indicate any specific NGN and IMS-related speaking topics and expertise. Speaking topic abstracts of one or two paragraphs are especially helpful. Please send to: pr@ngnforum.org.

NGN/IMS Forum in the News

VoIP Conference & Expo at IIT

October 27-29, 2009

Join us for 2-3 days of VoIP at the Fifth Annual VoIP Conference and Expo at Illinois Institute of Technology on October 27-29, 2009, from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM. Visit http://www.cpd.iit.edu/voipconference09 for details.

Recent NGN/IMS Forum Press Releases

Why Join the IMS Forum

The NGN/IMS Forum's mission is to accelerate the interoperability of NGN and IMS applications and services, enabling enterprise and residential consumers to quickly benefit from the delivery of quadruple play voice, video, Internet and mobile services over broadband via cable, mobile and fixed networks.

NGN/IMS applications and services comprise residential VoIP, entertainment including IPTV and gaming, IP Centrex / IP PBX and unified communications for business including fixed-mobile converged services, videoconferencing and web-collaboration. NGN and IMS networks include DSL, Cable, GSM, UMTS, Wi-Fi and WiMAX implementations.

The NGN/IMS Forum Plugfests, typically held every 3 to 4 months, bring together dozens of industry-leading NGN and IMS vendors from around the world, all of whom build real, full-featured, NGN and IMS networks during the test event.

If you are interested in joining the NGN/IMS Forum, Plugfests or in participating in any of the working groups or marketing programs, please contact the NGN/IMS Forum.

All are invited to participate in the industry's first open NGN/IMS Community where Forum members, those involved in various NGN and IMS working groups, the IMS Linkedin group, our industry and colleagues around the world can participate in active, mutually beneficial discussions. Take a moment to register now.

Our members are shaping the future of the NGN and IMS. Joining the NGN/IMS Forum enables members to:

• Verify and certify interoperability, reduce costs and accelerate time to market
• Participate in technical working groups focusing on service creation and applications for NGN/IMS architecture, framework and deployment issues
• Gain additional visibility through the NGN/IMS Forum's Speakers Bureau, public relations and marketing programs
• Showcase member companies at major telecom, cable, and wireless events in North America, Asia, and Europe
• Receive current market and technology information through newsletters, reports, white papers and conferences
• Gain access to an informed professional network of industry consultants and accredited experts

Have a request? We welcome your feedback on this newsletter.
NGN/IMS Forum Press & Newsletter Contact: pr@imsforum.org