NEC says that it has surpassed 100 million subscriber licenses worldwide for IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) based telephony systems for telecommunication network operators.

IMS is a service platform that utilizes SIP, a common international standard signaling protocol, to integrate voice and multimedia services by migrating from legacy telephony networks, including TDM/ATM switches, to full IP based telephony and multimedia service networks. NEC’s first shipment of SIP based telephony system was in 2002.

“NEC is a leader in the fast-growing session control function (CSCF) server business particularly in the Asia Pacific market. With the IMS market rapidly growing across other regions of the global market, NEC is in a position to be a leading IMS supplier,” said Diane Myers, directing analyst for VoIP and IMS at Infonetics Research.

“Surpassing 100 million subscriber licenses is a major milestone for NEC’s IMS business operations, which enable telecom operators to provide end users with cost effective IP based multimedia services, including voice over IP,” said Shunichiro Tejima, Senior Vice President, NEC Corporation. “The rapid evolution of ICT markets will increase the importance of IMS for commercial Voice-over-LTE (VoLTE) services and rich communication suites (RCS).”