Converge Around What? - By Richard Chirgwin
 The
world could really do with an anatomy of convergence, but that would need
a thesis, not an article!
A decade or so back, the expression was used to describe something
which never really happened: everything was going to converge on a single
piece of consumer electronics hardware, so you would have one box which
could act as a TV, computer, and video-phone. It never seemed to occur to
the thought-leaders of the day that some people use the phone, TV, and
computer at the same time; nor that the overwhelming trend in consumer
electronics was to sell users more devices, not fewer.
As the Internet took off, convergence was taken to describe what was
happening to traffic on networks. Everything, the argument went, would
converge to a single network.
That description of convergence has been more, but not completely,
successful.
Nearly everything travels as data these days and much of it is
traversing an IP infrastructure for at least part of the journey. So
convergence is true in that sense.
But at the same time, the customer end of convergence has, ahem,
diverged. That “single” IP network fans out to a host of possible customer
tails – wired broadband (be it ADSL, cable, or fibre), shared wireless
broadband (wireless Ethernet for short range, 802.16 for longer range), or
cellular networks.
What of the migration of communications features away from proprietary
hardware, towards being lines of code hosted on standard software? The
very shift which has given birth to capabilities like VoIP? This also
represents a manifestation of convergence; one in which quite different
services are created not by deploying new switches, but by writing new
software for existing platforms.
Well ... it's convergence, but not as we know it.
Three definitions of convergence; all accurate (to a degree), but like
the blind men grasping different parts of the elephant, all of them
incomplete. Definitions of convergence are incomplete because they
describe a technical phenomenon, but convergence is truly a social
phenomenon: its focal point is not a technology, but a user.
It's a phenomenon that's taking place in step with another great social
change, the blurring of the line between “at home” and “at work”. The
earliest views of convergence focussed on consumer behaviour only and, to
this day, the consumer electronics industry still thinks of convergence in
terms of consumer devices.
But the consumer is no longer so easily distinguished from the
employee: they're one and the same person, working and playing at the same
time.
All that converged technology, in other words, is only valuable to
people if we learn to understand “social convergence”. We have the
converged network; it's now time to learn about the converged user.
Here, I believe, is the future of convergence: the winners in the
market will be the companies whose technical platforms, skills base,
partnerships and sales are matched by an understanding of the users around
whose needs all this technology is converging.
If you're a user it's a wonderful vision, if someone can build the
services and manage the converged network.
Hence the role of companies like Macquarie Telecom - a carrier who can
manage not just the network, but the dizzying array of hosts,
applications, hardware and data that turns the packet transport into
services for users.
* Richard Chirgwin has 17 years as a journalist specialising in
IT&T. He is currently working as a freelance journalist, as well as
editing the CommsWorld Website (www.commsworld.com.au) and consulting with
telecommunications research analyst Telsyte. | 
