The IMS procurement process was started in 2009 and mainly driven by the China Mobile full service-convergent strategy. The project covers 31 provinces and has the capacity to provide advanced services to 14 million subscribers. It is by far the largest IMS deployment to date.
The first deployment phase will target businesses, households and individuals upon demand and will provide multimedia telephony, convergent IP Centrex, and other services such as MRBT (Multimedia Ring-Back Tone).
Huawei worked closely with China Mobile to design the solution, write the specifications and proceed with the testing. This allowed Huawei to fully understand China Mobile’s needs and requirements.
Peng Tao, president of IMS, Huawei, said: “As part of Huawei All-IP convergence strategy, the IMS is the simple solution to converge fixed and mobile networks to support full service operations. It enables operators to quickly deliver multimedia services to the market. Huawei keeps its customer-centric strategy and leveraged its professional services capabilities to deliver a leading IMS solution that will enable China Mobile to leverage its 3G network roll out.”
A Gartner report released in March 2010, "Market Share: Carrier Network Infrastructure, Worldwide, 2009", acknowledged Huawei’s position in the market, stating: “Huawei’s core network in the VoIP switching field, with 18.2% revenue market share, ranks first in the world.” The study covers the following products: soft switches; IMS (CSCF); media gateways; signaling gateways; and session border controllers (SBCs). As of February 2010, Huawei won more than 120 commercial and trial IMS contracts.