No abstract

Wireline-wireless convergence has become an important trend in the telecommunications industry as service providers (SPs) infrastructures, to a combination of infrastructures (e.g., wireless-wireline, including cable and highspeed wireless Internet access [Wi-Fi] providers) that have the potential to offer increased cost efficiency, or to a simple bundling or reselling of services to simplify offerings to the customer. This paper highlights many of the key areas of convergence and provides insight into some of its most important aspects, which will influence the technology, the services, the customers, and ultimately the industry itself; it is organized as follows. IntroductionMany forces have buffeted the telecommunications industry over the past decade, including rapid regulatory and technological change and intense competition. All these forces have combined to rapidly reshape an industry that was very stable during its fully regulated period and to provide it with both great opportunity and increased risk. One of the forces currently exerting a strong influence on the industry is convergence. This term means many different things to many people; it can refer to the convergence/ provision/integration of services across multiple 59The following section, "Motivation for Convergence," explains the telecommunications needs of customers and how these needs influence the services provided by service providers (SPs); it also shows how customer services become integrated and ultimately affect the underlying services and technologies.The succeeding section, "Enabling Technologies and Architectures," describes how technology and network architectures are enabling converged services with standardization across all access technologies while providing the ability to deliver the same services across wireless and wireline/cable/Wi-Fi networks and to integrate many aspects of the networks in an access-independent environment.The next section, "Current Network Environment and Service Convergence," describes a typical SP environment and the challenge the SP faces in attempting to provide new converged services while continuing to profit from its legacy investments.The subsequent section, "IN/WIN and SIP," describes the role of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) in the new converged networks and its relationship to intelligent network (IN)/wireless IN (WIN) voice network capabilities. As networks evolve, and as Internet Protocol (IP) services evolve to the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), it will be critical to make full use of the capabilities of IN/WIN; this section describes how best to do so.The penultimate section, "Network Convergence Case Study," provides an example case study for network convergence and shows the potential cost advantage of wireless-wireline convergence. If the regulatory environment permits it, such cost advantage may change the industry.The final section, "Regulatory and Other Challenges of Convergence," discusses regulatory aspects of convergence; it is followed by a summarizing conclusion.

The success of converged next-generation networks (NGNs)

No abstract

Moving toward the third-generation (3G),