Convergence. Let us count the ways. Voice/data. Fixed/Wireless. All-IP Core. Voice/video calling. Unified communications. Triple play. Triple-screen ready. You probably have your own favorite telecom topic in which the word “convergence” has to pop up now and again to prove you’re serious and forward-looking. Generally, we discuss these aspects of convergence in terms of the service provider’s infrastructure and way of doing business: the economies to be derived from an all-IP core; the need for new generations of billing and management systems to handle previously disparate services in one place; service bundling opportunities. All good stuff, and you’ll read about all of this and more elsewhere in this edition of Pipeline.

I thought it might be interesting to reflect on the topic of convergence from the end customers’ perspective. Does it mean anything to customers? What do they hope to get out of all this? It’s worth asking, because most of us inside the industry sometimes forget that new and exciting services may turn customers on for a while, but the customers don’t necessarily care much about the underlying technologies, business processes, and business models – except insofar as they affect the price.

These days, customer excitement doesn’t last long. Our industry does a great job of continuously raising expectations. Customers’ perceptions of a new service evolve rapidly. Incredible; magical; ho-hum. What’s next? While our grandparents’ amazement at being able to make a transatlantic phone call lasted years (mainly because they couldn’t afford to make one very often) today our amazement level asymptotes to near-zero over just a few weeks, or hours if you’re younger than thirty. Facebook, eBay, LinkedIn, Hulu all rapidly become established bricks in the walls of peoples’ lives. The first voice/video call to uncle Jim in New Zealand is a real event. Come his next birthday, it’s another item on the to-do list: call Jim, say nice things about the sheep.

them to invent Facebook, or eBay, or to implement an affordable voice/video service to New Zealand, we’d still be waiting.

The converged services platform of the Internet is well on the way to delivering a big part of what businesses and individuals need in the way of convergence. Make it bigger, better, more secure, and faster, that would be cool. But right now it looks like we’re on the right lines. From the customer’s point of view, the converged services platform of the Internet addresses half of the convergence challenge.

What’s the other half? We need access. Access, and carrying the bits, is what we