Converged services emerge
The term "convergence" is often thrown around as a way to make a telecoms offering sound more impressive than it actually is, and when investigating definitions of the subject it is easy to see why there is no agreement on what it means.
Searching for the definition of convergence online yields results ranging from the "conglomeration of media" to "the principle that the various public media, such as radio, TV, the print media, CD players/stereos, video recorders, telephones and the Internet, are all coming together to form one information channel".
According to YourDictionary convergence means the “coming together of voice, facsimile, data, video, and image applications, systems, and networks, both wireline and wireless.” This may be the best definition when looking at what convergence is in the broadband market.
When looking at convergence as the move towards quadruple play services – the combination of voice, broadband, video and mobile services – South Africa is still very far from seeing fully converged services.
The first converged voice and Internet offerings have however already hit the market.
Brian Nielson, research director at BMI-Technology, addressing the media at a Neotel sanctioned event recently, said that many local players were launching bundled services, as an early entree into the future landscape of true convergence between fully converged networks and services.
These include iBurst’s broadband and iCall service, Vox Telecom’s ADSL phone, MWeb’s ADSL and Broadband Talk service and Telkom’s Do Broadband Closer packages.
“Most of these offerings are bundles of voice and broadband internet combinations. We have also seen some telecoms and pay TV bundles,” said Nielson.
MWeb recently launched its MWeb ADSL, DStv PVR and VoIP service for R599 per month, giving South Africa a taste of what is to come.
While the other services do provide a combination of voice and Internet, Nielson said that Neotel can be seen as the first to launch a truly converged voice and data network, in the form of their CDMA EV-DO offering.
“The service is fully converged both from a technology or delivery platform perspective, and also from a service perspective, since the voice and internet components of the service are indivisible,” said Nielson.
“What will be interesting to observe in future is which player will be the first truly converged fixed and mobile network player. The operator landscape in South Africa, and across the whole continent, is moving rapidly towards fixed-mobile convergence,” Nielson concluded.
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