The frills of maintaining separate network for various services that a telephony service operator offers has come into urgent attention over the past few years. The big wide world of telephony has fallen from the heavens from an industry used to be the race horse that investors fell head over heels to put their money into to a stock market pariah. The strategy over the years has been – more subscribers, higher ARPU, higher Revenue. Cost Cutting and efficiency issues came to the fore front quite recently.
Most telephony operators in the world are multi service providers who offer services over mobile phones as well as fixed phone; some offer broadband while some offer cable television as well; To maintain different types of networks for all these services becomes not just cumbersome but extremely expensive as well.
Convergence has been the buzz word for years. But what started off as an idea is taking shape at various levels of the telephony network.
In the last mile of the network (that’s you and me consumers, the connection between the consumer of a service and the closest touch point of the service provider) the idea of dropping an optic fiber to a consumer’s home has been touted for years.
In the next leg where the touch point (the nearest touch point that I talked about earlier) is connected to various other internal parts of the network the idea of a converged core has been planned.
And further on where different operators touch each other across borders and oceans also, change is imminent.
What has been the prerogative has been to make these different networks as similar to each other as possible so that interworking becomes seamless and easier.
The development that has made this possible is the extension of Ethernet and IP based technologies into every part of the network. Going forward the idea is to offer your television streams, access to the internet, audio and video calling and heck even your local radio through one single piece of cable that would come into your home.
