For Immediate Release
ATIS 1200 G Street, NW Suite 500 Washington, DC 20005	Contact: Trish St. Michel Phone: 202-434-8851 E-mail: tstmichel@atis.org www.atis.org

Leading Telco Carrier CTOs Identify IMS, IPTV and WiMAX Strategies

ATIS Technology Forum at TELECOM ’05 Receives Standing Room Only Attendence

October 25, 2005, Las Vegas – TELECOM 05 – Technology executives from the four largest telecom service providers presented a unified assessment of technology and trends Monday afternoon, offering equipment manufacturers and vendors in the audience insight to near- and long-term roll-out plans and the need for industry standardization before wide-scale deployments will take place.

Bill Smith, chief technology officer of BellSouth; Balan Nair, chief technology officer of Qwest; Chris Rice, executive vice president for network planning and engineering for SBC; and Mark Wegleitner, senior vice president for technology and chief technology officer for Verizon shared the stage Monday afternoon during the opening keynote session of TELECOM 05.

The panel, moderated by ATIS President and CEO Susan Miller, covered a range of topics from IMS to WiMAX to BellSouth and SBC’s experiences doing recovery after hurricanes Katrina and Rita earlier this month – at the same time that Wilma was churning across Florida.

Session overview:

IMS: All of the carriers agreed that IP Multimedia Subsystems technologies are a good foundation for moving toward a robust IP-based network, but cautioned that it is still a nascent technology that needs more standards development before it will be robust enough to deliver a full slate of data, voice and video across a converged wireline and wireless network.

WiMAX: Each CTO said they have examined WiMAX as a part of its broadband strategy. Several, including BellSouth’s Smith, said it is being examined as a possible broadband delivery option for rural areas. However, due to spectrum concerns and the need for uniform standards to bring the costs down to be feasible for wide-scale deployment, none of the CTOs seemed ready to endorse WiMAX as a definite player in their network. It isn’t a replacement for 3G wireless broadband, SBC’s Rice said.

VoIP: Sending voice over the network in IP packets is nothing new to the carriers. Nair cited more than 2 billion minutes of voice every day being routed across Qwest’s long distance network, and other carriers discussed building out overlay networks to facilitate the migration from POTS to IP. Maintaining the quality of service customer’s expect is key for Verizon, Wegleitner said, saying that VoIP over a managed IP network is more likely to deliver quality results than voice traveling over the public Internet.

ATIS is conducting eight breakout sessions at TELECOM 05 Tuesday and Wednesday as part of the ATIS Technology Forum. Topics include: IPTV, home networking, xDSL, carrier-class Ethernet, IMS, network security and WiMAX.

About ATIS

ATIS is a technical planning and standards development organization that is committed to rapidly developing and promoting technical and operations standards for the communications and related information technologies industry worldwide using a pragmatic, flexible and open approach. Participants from more than 350 communications companies are active in ATIS’ 23 industry committees and Incubator Solutions Program. www.atis.org

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