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Story URL: http://www.silicon.com/research/specialreports/convergedcomms/0,3800012981,39163353,00.htm

So what is convergence anyway?
Analysis: We walk you through the many meanings...

By Stewart Baines

Published: Thursday 07 December 2006

Devices, networks, services, voice, data, media, entertainment - convergence can refer to any one of these areas and is so often used its meaning can be lost. Stewart Baines explains the term's numerous definitions.

It was perhaps Nicholas Negroponte who first identified convergence. Founding the MIT Media Lab in the late 1970s he foresaw the coming together of the worlds of IT, television and movies, and print and publishing.

Decades later and convergence is all around us: in the boardroom, on the stock market, over the air and in your pocket. It's a terms used possibly too frequently and frivolously, and now has lost its prophetic meaning. Convergence can be stuck like a label on any product or service that a vendor chooses.

More on converged communications and SMEs

♦ Research report
Read the full analysis of research into converged communications conducted by The Bathwick Group and silicon.com

♦ Video with Jonathan Steel
Watch a video interview with The Bathwick Group analyst Jonathan Steel discussing SMEs' use of communications technologies

So just what is convergence in the technology industry? That depends on who you ask. The business pages of a daily paper will state with authority that convergence is the driving force behind cable company NTL's merger with Virgin Mobile, while the technology supplement writes about the latest converged handset.

And in the corporate boardroom, convergence is a multimillion-pound project to replace one phone system with another that ostensibly does the same thing only a little cheaper and with a few more functions.

To anyone involved directly or indirectly with IT, telecoms, media and consumer electronics, convergence can mean something entirely different depending on your industry or job title.

With this in mind, the Bathwick Group and silicon.com surveyed small and medium-sized businesses about what convergence means to them.

Seventy-one per cent recognise it as the delivery of voice, video and data across all networks. Half of them think it also refers to the integration of fixed and mobile solutions. Fifty per cent again believe convergence relates to a device that provides all fixed and mobile voice and data services on a single handset. (Read the full research results.)

The majority of telecoms managers and IT directors in small and medium-sized businesses view convergence as the introduction of IP telephony into the LAN and WAN, what we commonly call voice-data convergence. By combining the phone system with the data network, considerable savings can be made in bandwidth and network management. And the use of an IP-based phone system can also lower costs compared to proprietary phone switches. (Watch the video with analyst Jonathan Steel on how smaller companies use new comms technologies.)

In the IT/telecoms world of enterprise communications, convergence can also be applied to messaging. Receiving voicemail, email and instant messages through the same client, irrespective of device, is either called unified or integrated messaging. Both fall firmly within the realm of voice-data convergence.

Is there a difference between convergence and 'integrated' or 'unified' communications? Is integrated communications a step towards unification, driven by the trend in convergence? Or are they different terms to describe a new phone system from three different vendors with ostensibly the same feature set: one is called converged, another integrated and the third unified?

Just four per cent of respondents to the Bathwick Group/silicon.com survey believe convergence relates to competitive consolidation in the telecoms, media and IT industry.

Yet this idea of convergence was recognised at a political level some years ago. The merger of telecoms, radio and television regulators into the new Office of Communications (Ofcom) pre-empted the organisational issues that the industries would be facing: Sky entering broadband, BT launching on-demand video content and mobile operators wanting to use radio-spectrum to broadcast television to handsets.

But it is in the merging realm of fixed and mobile that convergence is now most at home. But even then, fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) means many things. Loosely this idea consists of service convergence, network convergence and device convergence.

Service convergence is where, to the customer, it looks like they have one service provider but actually they access multiple networks. The service provider aggregates billing for all these services including broadband and voice, onto a single bill. Maybe a single contact centre can deal with all calls whether relating to internet connectivity, text messaging or voice packages. And bundles could be used across multiple media. For instance, a 500 minute allowance could be spread between fixed and mobile calls, or broadband access could also include wi-fi and HSDPA surfing as well as ADSL.

Device convergence is pretty straightforward: one handset that can be used inside the home or office and also outside. Indoors it connects to and sends data over a broadband internet connection via wi-fi or Bluetooth. Outside of wireless range, GSM takes over. In early services, these two types of call were entirely separate and could in fact feature two different telephone numbers. More mature offerings feature live handover, which means a call that is started indoors over wi-fi can continue outside over GSM. This is technically quite difficult and the source of much industry debate over recent years as to its worth.

The pinnacle of convergence is perhaps network convergence, which relates to carriers' core networks rather than enterprise networks. The idea here is that, rather than maintain separate networks for mobile, PSTN, internet and corporate IP services, all services are run over the same shared infrastructure. Different access networks such as HDSPA, GSM, wi-fi, IP and ADSL will then plug into that infrastructure. (Read the research on which technologies SMEs plan to invest in.)

Not only will this save operators billions of pounds in reduced management and capital costs, it will make communications services device-agnostic. The end point will be an individual's IP address rather than a specific device, so you could place a call to a friend on your mobile and they could pick it up on their TV set-top box or - via a 'softphone' - their laptop. Network convergence relies on the maturation of IMS (IP multimedia subsystem) and consequently will not happen overnight.

But these are not the only occurrences of convergence. It occasionally refers to the convergence of MP3 player, gaming console, phone, camera and PDA into a single device. Convergence also crops up in reference to converged billing systems, convergence in the multimedia call centres, computer animation and so on.

It can result in a fragmented view of convergence but there is a uniting theme: digitisation. Digitising the analogue world is the underlying driver of all convergence: voice and data, telecoms and IT, content and network, fixed and mobile. It's been the driver for immense upheaval in the IT, telecoms, internet, television and consumer electronics industries and consequently convergence has become the greatest adjective of our age.