With only 17 percent of service provider respondents to the IHS IMS study saying they are running IMS networks in a NFV environment, this concept is still relatively new. But the ability to scale services up and down quickly and operational efficiencies, the research firm revealed that respondent use of IMS in NFV environments will grow to 78 percent by 2018.
IHS noted that wireline VoIP service continues to make up the majority of IMS deployments. Since proving the business case for the services is challenging to transition from wireline VoIP to mobile services over IMS, the transition is taking place in a measured fashion. Out of the service providers IHS surveyed, 57 to 65 percent of service providers offer residential voice over broadband, SIP trunking or hosted business VoIP over IMS, a trend it says will grow to 87 to 91 percent by 2018. Service providers like Verizon (NYSE: VZ) are quickly converging their fixed and mobile services. Post