We recently did a webinar on FMC with the Voice and Video over IP Quality Alliance (V2oIPQA). (if you missed it you can check out the webinar here: http://www.iian.ibeam.com/events/mult001/22800/)
In preparation for this webinar we decided to survey several of the major FMC vendors at NXTComm last week. In particular we were interested in seeing what their FMC architectures looked like:
- Is anyone following the official VCC standards, or were they using pre-VCC approaches?
- Are they deploying a single VCC AS, or were the CCCF and physically NDSF seperated?
- How were they interfacing to the mobile network?
It turns out everyone was claiming to support VCC although I did not have much time to verify the details. I also did not find any vendor deploying a seperate NDSF.
I was also interested in understanding if these vendors were incorporating CAP/MAP/SS7 interfaces directly into their products. It turns out they are not - everyone I spoke too was using external gateways to keep their VCC devices pure-IP. One of the IMS gateway vendors I talked to backed this up.
From a test perspective this makes things a lot easier as SS7 test equipment and CAP/MAP test cases are not required for testing the VCC device. However, it also means our Figure 5.8 on page 134 would be more accurate if the CAP/MAP interface coming from the VCC AS to the 2G RAN (to a MSC) should be going to a SGW instead of direct into the cloud.
On that note, we the 2G ad 3G RAN should really be labled as PLMNs instead, since we are talking about the switching infrastucture, not just the radio network components.
