* Happy birthday to us
The success of a television series is often measured by whether or not it has lasted five years, because after five years the series is guaranteed to go into syndication – and with syndication comes years of residual income from countless reruns of the show. So today we’d like to announce that (by television standards) our Convergence Newsletter has reached a milestone. Next week we celebrate this newsletter’s five-year anniversary.
We’d also like to take this opportunity to thank Network World for their continued support, to thank the newsletter’s sponsors for their continued advertising, and most of all, thank our readers for their kind attention and many words of constructive criticism and encouragement.
Although we might wish now we’d negotiated our contract with Network World for years of reruns and residual income, we promise not to rest on the 500 or so “past episodes” of Convergence newsletters. However, we would like to use the next several editions as a retrospective to see what has changed – and what hasn’t – with convergence in our five-year history.
To begin the retrospective, in our first week’s newsletter we introduced the four faces of convergence: premises convergence, access convergence, network convergence and services convergence. We defined:
* Premises convergence as the melding of voice and data on a common device, such as a PC, phone or router.
* Access convergence as broadband or multiservice access media like DSL, cable modem technology and wireless broadband.
* Network convergence as the integration of data and voice networks’ transport and signaling infrastructures in a carrier’s core network.
* Services convergence as the marriage of applications and multiple services bundled as a single option.
Either by consulting magic or by dumb luck, we’re happy to report that these four faces continue to represent and broadly define the principal aspects of convergence. Next time, we’ll talk about how each has evolved in ways that we couldn’t even imagine five years ago.
