It seems to be on the tip of everyone’s tongues: analysts, Internet gurus, even marketing personnel for enterprise networking vendors.
Amongst these futurists, though, resides a divergence of opinions about how convergence will be achieved.
What almost everybody agrees on is basically what convergence is: the ability to send all communications over one (fat) pipe. In simpler terms, your business will be sending all its voice, video, data – even fax – transmissions over one network. And as Cisco Systems likes to say, IP or Internet Protocol will be “the network of networks.”
What is disagreed upon is almost everything else. For example, what applications will run on a converged network? What medium will the converged network use?
And perhaps most importantly, when are we going to get there?