Most wireline and wireless telecommunications operators have identified IMS as an essential element in their future strategic network architecture. It has been selected in order to support the economic and controlled deployment of multiple services in a standardized manner. Nevertheless, IMS is being slowly deployed with many carriers still only trialing their planned IMS solutions in the lab and field. Before the arrival of IMS in production networks, and as an expedient way of delivering new IP services, many operators have been deploying them using IMS-compliant products and components. The expectation is that they will migrate these services to IMS in the future; these services are then categorized as being pre-IMS.

What is becoming apparent is that many pre-IMS services entail the same needs for Quality assurance and efficient network utilization as those for IMS. For example, IPTV and other VOD services deployed in pre-IMS architectures are extremely bandwidth-hungry despite efforts to curtail their demands through the use of new encoding techniques and multicasting where possible. Many operators have responded to this by putting their new video services into 'hard' network partitions, or have attempted to over-provision network resources. The former is both costly and time-consuming to deploy and fails to recognize that, even within a partition, network resources are still dynamic thus obviating the benefit of simple call counting. The latter is costly, and as the resources aren't reserved for the service in question they can be consumed by ever-growing 3rd party application and peer-to-peer traffic volumes.

Operax Resource Controllers have been developed to solve both near-term pre-IMS challenges, as well as those that will arrive when IMS is deployed in full. All Operax products and components are in fact suitable for any type of IP network, whether IMS, pre-IMS, or even non-IMS. However, to specifically address the near-term demand from carriers to support single-services in pre-IMS architectures Operax has developed Resource Controller 3300. This is a dynamic topology and resource aware solution that can make intelligent admission decisions for any type of next-generation services - thus providing a much superior solution to statically configured call counters. To assist in ease and low cost of deployment it is provided with pre-configured templates and has more restricted interfaces than the multi-service Resource Controller 5500 product. Being built on the same technology as Resource Controller 5500 means that migration to full multi-service IMS can be achieved through a simple upgrade and re-configuration exercise.