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Your advert here!!! Technical Editors:
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Just when you thought that no more networking standards were possibly needed, another one comes along. This time it is Multimedia Telephony or MMTel, for short. In effect, MMTel is a stop gap solution between all the legacy gear which the established mobile network operators possess and the holy grail of a completely IP based network which IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) promises. According to Broadsoft's CTO, Scott Hoffpauir, "The industry has been guilty of being fixated on the promises of the IMS future while sometimes losing sight of the need to continue generating new revenue streams today." In other words, Broadsoft reckons it can enable mobile operators to add all of today's trendy clichés – like VoIP-Web 2.0 mash-ups – to services which they can actually offer right here, right now using existing gear. Plus, of course, one of Broadsoft's Broadworks VoIP application platforms which is not only IMS-ready but conveniently MMTel compliant, too. Not that Broadsoft has gone out on a limb with MMTel. The standard has received some heavy duty backing from the likes of ETSI (the body that gave us GSM) and the 3GPP – the body that merges the internet with the mobile world.
So why exactly would anyone need multimedia telephony? Well, right now it is possible to make a voice and video call across all kinds of network from mobile to cable. But what if you wanted to share information at the same time? Using MMtel, you could have a concurrent instant messaging (IM) session or participate in a whiteboarding session at the same time. So multimedia telephony can take advantage of all that extra capacity mobile operators are building by rolling out the likes of HSDPA. Multimedia telephony isn't exactly Mobile Software Insight's cup of tea, but there's some industries out there which would appreciate being able to share loads of information across multiple network types.
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