Welcome to the third issue of IJBDCN in 2009! This issue contains four articles focused on Next Generation Networks (NGN).rnThere is a paradigm shift in the telecommunications industry today due to convergence in various technologies and services, the ubiquity of the Internet, the intelligence of terminal devices and declining cost of telecom bandwidth. The industry today is divided between two sets of firms: (a) the traditional telecommunications companies, which have their legacy infrastructure and market orientation, and still are closely regulated, and (b) the new age firms that attempt to provide all telecom services overthe ubiquitous Internet, almost free, with entirely different revenue models, and are not closely watched by the regulators. The NGN is expected to bridge the gap between these two sets of firms, enabling the traditional telcos to offer Internet Protocol (IP) based services while allowing newly developed IP-based services by the Internet firms to be offered over the network infrastructure of telcos. An important paradigm in this arena is IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) which may be defined as a generic architectural framework for delivering IP multimedia services. It is considered to be the 'next big thing' in the Telecom industry. However, though the NGN technologies are at an advanced state of development, industry is rather slow to adopt it due to legacy issues.
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