“I think that people are looking for different shapes and sizes in their devices,” adds Harrobin. “It’s no longer the days of everybody wanting the smallest phone. People value the real estate of the screen.
“What people have also told us is that they want a tactile keyboard,” he continues. “They want the touch and feel and experience of a keyboard, especially if they’re doing e-mail.”
Chamberlain believes that converged devices will have to evolve even further. “Right now there is really not a suitable device to give us portability and mobility. I think there’s something bigger—more than a cell phone, smaller than a laptop, and perhaps more specialized. I think that a new device, different from what we’re accustomed to seeing right now, could push convergence as much as any of the network services.”
The first device to approach that vision is the iPhone, he says. “It is a pretty good example of what we might need to see. We need wild thinking, something that is far out of our own experience. When I saw the iPhone, I thought that no current telephone manufacturer could have come up with that.
“If we’re really going to get convergence, we have to change the way we think. It’s not just the networks, not the applications, but a huge change in the way that we think.”
Hurdles could slow convergence
Creative, non-traditional thinking could help telecom companies overcome one lingering hurdle to convergence, Chamberlain says. “The biggest regulatory hurdles right now are the old ones. In the past, when you walked into one of the Bells, there was absolutely a wall in their building between the regulated and unregulated side. They couldn’t talk, couldn’t share information; there were a lot of things they were not able to do. I don’t think that wall is as powerful right now from the regulatory standpoint, but the walls are still inside the building. In some of the Bells they consider wireless an enemy, a competitor. To really converge, they need to find a way to do it inside their own walls.” He notes that there is no such legacy in the cable companies, and that lack of history may allow cable to make rapid progress on providing converged services.
At the same time, government regulation could still determine how fast convergence will happen. Allocation of spectrum will have a big impact. “For convergence to succeed, at least some spectrum blocks will need to be opened to the deployment of multiple services. Artificial spectrum silos based on
technology will not be suitable to a converged world,” says Parker.
Listen to CTIA’s Mark Desautels &
TNS Telecom’s Charles White
discuss convergence & the bright
possibilities for the future in
CTIA's Wireless "Convergence"
Podcast.
