IP Convergence: Beyond VoIP, Beyond Cost Savings

As the first of what I hope will be a series of posts, I am going to talk about what Fixed Mobile Convergence is, or at least what it means from my perspective.

There are three different areas of FMC: Marketing Convergence, Device Convergence, and Network Convergence.

Marketing Convergence

As the name itself might suggest, the fundamental thing happening in a marketing level of convergence is that all of the convergence is a facade. It is the ability to buy both your mobile and your other communications from the same vendor, have it all on one bill. For the enterprise, the act of buying your voice, data network, and mobile all from the same carrier provides the promise of savings as a direct result of the economic leverage gained from paying such a large bill every month. For the consumer, there may be an expectation that a combined service or bundle will result in a lower total price, but this is probably not the case.

Network Convergence

The aspect of convergence that is the most invisible to the end-user is the convergence happening in the service providers network and systems. We have done quite a bit of this convergence at Global Crossing the past 5 years, except converging our mobile traffic since we don't have any mobile traffic or customers to speak of. Everything else has pretty much converged onto our IP core, exception only to a few minor bits of legacy traffic which are either being canabalized by native IP services (such as ATM and Frame Relay is by IP-VPNs) or through forklifting legacy components with IP gear (such as our decommissioning DMS500's and replacing them with SONUS gateways). At the time of this writing, well over 50% of our total voice traffic carried is on our IP network, and incidentally, that's the same network that supports our customer IP-VPNs as well as all of our Internet traffic. Thanks to QoS we all sleep well at night knowing that your long distance calls will get priority on the network should anything whacky happen on the Internet service side.

All of this network convergence activity is enabled as a result of networked applications converging to a standard language for networked communication, Internet Protocol. Without IP becoming the predominant protocol, we would most likely still be arguing over Ethernet or ATM, and none of this would have been possible. Thank goodness the collective industry ended up in a good spot.

Device Convergence

Not all that long ago, carrier network architects were on a quest for something they called a "god box," that is, a carrier-class network device that did everything they wanted: Private Line (SONET/SDH, DCS, maybe WDM), ATM and Frame, Ethernet, and IP). A few companies tried to deliver such a product, but no one was successful, largely because it was too expensive to put all of that into one box vs. having a purpose built product for the task.

Martin Geddes reminds us in a very down to earth alarm clock example that putting too much stuff into a product can be a bad thing. Of course we are sick of having to carry around all these purpose built devices like a watch, an iPod, a PDA, a mobile phone, a laptop, and a camera, but do we really want what we think we want?

I think I do. I love gadgets, and I don't mind figuring out how to use them if they've got a half decent intuitively designed user interface. If I've got to spend a Sunday afternoon studying the dictionary-sized manual that came with it, that's not so good.

For the average user, however, it is a big deal. Consumer products have to "pass the wife-test", or they will ultimately be doomed to ending up on the household geeks desk, perhaps banished to a drawer permanently.

Oh yes, devices will converge. Maybe not completely. My phone may not replace my watch and my watch may not replace my alarm clock, but there's no reason why I can't expect a handheld device that runs over WiFi as well as cellular, runs all our internal workflow applications, keeps me in touch with my email, lets me open those pesky attachments and collaborate on them with colleagues, runs a voice client that delivers calls an extension off the company PBX, etc. etc. There's no reason why that device can't be my desk phone when I set it into a cradle. There's no reason why it can't have more than one profile so that when I'm Dave Siegel the family man instead of a Global Crossing employee it doesn't automatically plug into the corporate VPN and lets me use my SciFi Channel Mobile service (doesn't exist as far as I know, but I wouldn't be a fan of Mobile ESPN or Disney Mobile).

I will also happily have a reasonable digital camera in that device. Since I'm carrying this device around all the time, I can take pictures of those settings where you "never have a camera handy when you need one." For the rest of the time I'll tote a more specialized device around like a Canon Digital Rebel XT 350D.

The god box idea ultimately failed because everyone recognized that as applications converged to IP the demand for a swiss army knife of telecom equipment would drop, but I see no such boogey man threatening device convergence. I suspect we'll see a lot of choices out there for converged devices, but the one with that's the easiest to use will be the winner.