Written by Tammy Parker, editor of FierceWirelessTech.
Interop Technologies has partnered with a Canadian mobile operator on parallel lab testing of Rich Communication Services (RCS) with and without an IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) core as the vendor strives to prove the time-to-market advantages for an operator that offers RCS even before it has established stable IMS functionality.
"We're trying to convince them not to wait till their IMS core is up and commercial," said Damian Sazama, vice president of corporate and product marketing at Interop, who declined to name the operator involved. "They still have a ways to go to get their IMS core up and running for VoLTE and so forth, so that's why we urged them to let us do this trial both ways," he told FierceBroadbandWireless.
Some vendors developing RCS solutions requires those to work with an IMS core, which many Tier1 operators are already installing in preparation for RCS and voice over LTE (VoLTE), said Sazama. Other vendors, however are implementing RCS functionality either within an IMS Core network or without an IMS Core network.
In Interop's case, the vendor has built the IMS functionality that RCS requires into its server. "It's not full IMS functionality, but only the IMS functionality that RCS requires," Sazama said. "We're trying to get the word out there that you don't need an IMS core.
Read the full article at Fierce Wireless