Convergência é isso aí…
a ATT e a BELLSOUTH americanas estão em processo de fusão, dependendo de aprovação [certa] dos acionistas e [muito provável] da FCC. as duas são as donas da CINGULAR, que tem mais de 54 milhões de usuários de celulares nos EUA. a nova companhia espera ser um dos grandes players americanos e do mundo em seja lá o que vier a ser convergência digital. segundo o press release… “The merger will also allow for closer integration of the company’s wireless, wireline, and IP products and services over a single global IP network. This is critical as the industry moves forward with convergence of the “three screens” that many consumers rely on most today — televisions, computers and wireless devices. It is an area in which AT&T is a leader through its strategic partnerships with Yahoo!® and others.” nenhuma palavra sobre telefone fixo. parece que morreu.
March 8th, 2006 at 9:47 am
I worked for “Convergys” in the UK. This is a billing company that focused since 1992 on “convergence” in business. Some of their clients are already offering an integrated package for energy and water, or fixed + mobile telephone or an interesting merger of everything.
The most interesting part of convergence is the ability to provide discounts across different areas to lure other customers. Plus that it provides 3 channels for gaining customers rather than one. The consumer could benefit, because they have to deal with only one ‘provider’. ( Whether the company delivers at lower marginal cost, I’ll leave that to somebody else to answer).
The biggest problems for convergence eventually are scalability of the system overall. One provider decided to integrate corporate and residential on the same database on a very powerful server, but was eventually developing a backlog of 3 weeks of calls (9 million pounds) that was estimated to grow to a backlog of 20 million within the next 2 months.
Consider the work and money involved ($$) in moving millions of customers from different types of billing systems to a single billing platform, so that the provisioning, discounting and bill formatting doesn’t need clunky interfaces. If there is no single platform for billing, the customer will still receive multiple separate bills to pay. Probably, this move has already been anticipated in this merger.