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using any device—or at least any device that is physically equipped to receive the service (e.g. there can be no video conferences while driving). Customers love this too. Convergence also allows you to blend services in a way that improves customer experience and benefits the consumer. A simple example would be to place Caller ID on the television. This service integration is uncomplicated, and it makes things easier for customers (especially couch potatoes). Or you might blend video instant messaging with TV so your customer can communicate with friends while watching a program.

More generally, convergence benefits consumers by enabling carriers to shift their focus from technology to the customers themselves. When you have to deploy and manage multiple infrastructures for multiple access methods—e.g. cable, 3G mobile, LTE, DSL—your focus tends to be on keeping all of those infrastructures up and running, modernizing and scaling them for growing traffic loads and new, in-demand services. Moreover, you must design your services around those separate infrastructures, which requires multiple forms of technical expertise and effort. There are just a lot more technology issues to which you must attend, and your efforts are largely technology driven. However, with a converged infrastructure, once you have it in place and managed by effective monitoring and troubleshooting tools, you can turn your attention to your customers. That is, you can focus on developing a set of services that the customer finds innovative, compelling, and useful—services your competitors may not offer. At this point, a service provider can become far more customer-oriented and dedicated, with an emphasis on multiple services that draw more customers. Some providers who have implemented a converged infrastructure have become very passionate about this mission, and now see themselves far more as customer- and service-driven companies than technology companies. In

technology and service delivery right from the start. Speed is important because once a competitor has grabbed a significant amount of market share, it’s hard—though not impossible—to dislodge it. This is particularly true in telecommunications because most busy consumers do not have time to examine and compare complicated service offerings, contracts, and so on. Once they’ve signed on, they are disinclined to repeat the hassle, unless the service quality is low or the service offerings are limited. Yet, this points to why you must get your network technology and service delivery right from the very beginning. Customers will churn if services are unreliable or just don’t work, if network outages occur frequently, if set-up times are slow, or if the quality of service transmission is poor.

One issue that often arises is whether the need to “get it right” is a reason to implement converged services based on IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem), which is a service delivery platform agnostic to access methods. Whether or not IMS will dominate the industry is still an open question, but here are some considerations. One advantage of IMS bears on the competitive need for speed in deployment. IMS already exists as a structured and standardized way for designing and delivering blended multi-play services. If you use it, then every time you build a service