The walled garden approach, adopted by most wireline and mobile telecom providers, has a number of key shortcomings says Pyramid Research's newest report ‘Transforming Telcos With IMS: The Telco Silver Bullet for an Applications-Centric World’. "The walled garden approach remains the preferred option for telcos, for a simple core reason: control," comments Svetlana Issaeva, the report's author.

The report found that the walled garden approach has many pros in the early stages of service rollout. Some of them include quality control, consistency of end-user interface and experience; optimisation of applications for the chosen devices; exclusive content serving as a competitive advantage; customer control and revenue control.

For all the advantages that the walled garden approach has, the report found that it does not take the full measure of the challenges telcos are facing. Walled gardens have a number of key limitations. The cost and ultimate price of quality of service and service customisation and also the restrictions to subscriber choices at a time when customer appetite for third party applications have fully developed make this model inadequate for ultimate IMS rollout.

"Ultimately, IMS will only fulfill its true promise once telcos start thinking beyond closed models," adds Issaeva. "IMS pushes carriers closer to partnership-based models, turning them into facilitators."
ww.pyr.com