Economic Analysis of Class 5 Migration to IMS

摘要

Telecommunication providers are increasingly choosing Internet Protocol Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) infrastructure. However, they often have substantial investment in the existing time division multiplexing (TDM) switches. The question arises: Should they cap but maintain existing TDM infrastructure and provision broadband subscribers on an Internet Protocol (IP) network, or should they consolidate the TDM network and proactively migrate their existing plain old telephone service (POTS) subscribers to IMS? In the former case, one has to maintain two networks and incur the operating expenses and the pertinent complexities. In the latter case, the cost of public switched telephone network (PSTN) replacement and earlier investment in IMS must be weighed against potential operations savings and possible incremental revenue. In this paper we provide an economic analysis of these two options. We find that consolidation and operational expense (OpEx) savings in the proactive migration to IMS are not enough to offset the costs of migration unless there are new revenue opportunities due to the new services that the PSTN replacement subscribers are willing to adopt.