* Retrospective: premises convergence
Continuing our retrospective on convergence, today we’d like to look back at how our original vision of premises convergence and has evolved since our first look at the subject five years ago.
When we originally defined premises convergence, we were impressed by PC software that allowed PC-to-PC “phone calls.” And we’re happy to report that now the original issues with VoIP call quality have largely been solved with proper engineering deployment and with acceptance of QoS-friendly protocols like MPLS.
What we didn’t anticipate in 2000 was the wide-scale acceptance and deployment of IP phones that use Ethernet connections, nor did we foresee how quickly the desktop phone would turn into a computing device. Nor did we expect that unified messaging and unified communications would be packaged into IP telephony systems so quickly. But there’s no doubt now – the IP phone is bound to replace traditional phone sets in the enterprise, and unified communications is now seen as an integral part of the IP telephony business case to improve person-to-person communications.
Perhaps the biggest change in premises convergence was about how the premises themselves would converge – or, more accurately, how IP telephony makes the premises boundaries of legacy telecom systems disappear. With IP telephony, the user’s geographic location no longer dictates user access to communications features. One of the benefits of IP telephony is that when a user has access to a broadband IP network connection and an IP phone or softphone, the user can enjoy the same “on-premise” telephony features offered by more traditional direct connections to a legacy PBX or single central office.
So today, we’d like to add these dimensions to our original category of premises convergence and reserve the right to add to the list in another five years.
Next time, we’ll look at how access convergence has evolved.
