By Paula Bernier

WiMAX, IMS and Ethernet seem to be two key themes at TelecomNEXT, as evidenced by the news from Siemens Communications this week at the show.

Noting that Verizon has an RFP out for broadband wireless gear, Harald Braun, president of the networks division of Siemens, told xchange in an advance interview that the company will be introducing a WiMAX solution for the North American market this week. Braun said Siemens is in lab trials with its IMS- compliant WiMAX gear, which he said is ready for deployment. Siemens already has completed interoperability to enable seamless handover between WiMAX, Wi-Fi and CDMA/GSM cells, he added.

Siemens this week will be showing a new version of its IMS-based fixed mobile convergence solution featuring seamless roaming and active handoffs between mobile cellular and Wi-Fi broadband networks. The PacketCable-compliant solution, expected to be available this spring, also includes support of personalized multimedia services across fixed and mobile architectures as well as fixed/mobile hosted enterprise solutions with presence-aware collaboration technologies.

Several trials that Siemens recently conducted with a national cable operator, which the vendor declined to name, demonstrated how the IMS/FMC V2.1 portfolio can integrate both packet- and circuit-switched telephony networks as well as a range of wireless and fixed technologies. For example, one scenario supported gaming between a player on a wireless device against a player on a fixed-line network device.

Other converged network services Siemens has successfully trialed with operators include:

*Intelligent Address Book – Stored on the Siemens IMS/FMC subsystem and, therefore, accessible on all networks, contact information only has to be entered once and is available to all end devices – mobile phones, PDAs, desktop phones and laptops. The application is secured to prohibit other subscribers from accessing it.

*Roaming Button – Allows a subscriber to receive calls and messages on the device that he or she is currently using. The roaming feature can be enabled or disabled based on presence and availability information.

*Call-and-Share – Data and voice work together with this feature.

While calling from home to a friend, with a mobile phone, to explain direction, a subscriber could also sketch a route on a city map and send the instructions to the friend’s mobile phone during the conversation.

Siemens also is using TelecomNEXT to tout the availability of its SURPASS hiD family of carrier Ethernet products in the United States. The MEF9-compliant Ethernet/MPLS solution delivers end-to-end hierarchical QoS per service and per subscriber, with resiliency of sub-50 milliseconds. This product line already is deployed by more than 10 operators throughout Europe and Asia, including at Deutsche Telekom for the operator’s recently announced IPTV initiative.

Siemens Communications Inc. www.usa.siemens.com/communications