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Perspective is a fascinating thing.

If you drive a little ways out of Chicago, where I live, you’ll find yourself in the middle of the pancake-flat rural Midwest. The wide expanses of farmland are cut by roads that are very often perfectly straight for miles.

As your eye follows the road off into the distance, the sides of the road, of course, seem to move closer and closer together until they eventually join- Until they converge.

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Greetings, and welcome to July! This month’s NewsWatch brings you some news about the digital TV transitions, Nortel’s self-sales, Nimbuzz, some customer wins and awards, and of course, some information about the brand new Apple iPhone . Sound interesting? Then read on and enjoy what we offer to offer you in the same way we hope you’re enjoying the beautiful July weather. Happy reading!

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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...

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The prospect of a new revenue stream is exciting. It can mean growth that translates into increased shareholder value and healthy bonuses for all involved. But new revenue streams are also challenging to find, difficult to project, and expensive to create. While they make for good headlines, they don’t always play as well in the board room, or in the CFO’s office. IT is partly to blame. IT suppliers and organizations have promised in the past that investments in new IT will result in new revenue. The OSS/BSS sector continues to voice this promise...

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Convergence of all types: network, service, device, payment type – and even organizations – are both driving and supporting the evolution of the telecommunications landscape. As Internet and media companies enter the arena, the competitive landscape is pushing operators to re-evaluate their networks, service portfolios, and the way they manage their customers.   

Three key market dynamics shaping the road to convergence today include: advanced devices, ...

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IMS means convergence and the promise of a unified experience: Communications with rich access to voice and internet and related services, with full access to multimedia and applications, and now with the ability for personalization.  

Look under the covers and you’ll see that the solutions offered by leading manufacturers consist of a complex myriad of individual products, in the domains of Maintenance, Applications, Session Control, ...

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Over the next several years, service providers will be providing customers with much more for much less, at least if revenue is calculated on a per-bit basis. Service providers are rapidly moving to all-IP networks, and IP traffic is expected to explode. Cisco Systems predicts that global IP traffic will exceed 667 exabytes by 2013, due largely to the growing popularity of bandwidth-consuming video, which is projected to rise to 90 percent of IP traffic (Cisco Global IP Traffic Forecast 2006-2011). Yet competitive pressures have driven...

Superficially, today’s fixed and mobile telephone networks are not too different from those of thirty or more years ago. You dial a number – it could be a special short number, or an 800 number, the principle is the same – signalling takes place to connect your call to the other party. Sure, the numbers you dial look different now. And they’ve added some nice features that make things more convenient – like a built-in answer-phone service and caller identification so you can filter out calls, find out who called and when etc...

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…” 

Whoa, Mr. Frost. I’m going to have to stop you right there.

I appreciate you stopping by this evening, but we’re spending some time talking about convergence. Not divergence. It’s sort of the opposite. Two roads coming together. Not splitting apart.