What is convergence anyway?

Devices, networks, services, voice, data, media, entertainment - convergence can refer to any one of these areas and is so often used its meaning can be lost. Stewart Baines explains the term's numerous definitions.

It was perhaps Nicholas Negroponte who first identified convergence. Founding the MIT Media Lab in the late 1970s he foresaw the coming together of the worlds of IT, television and movies, and print and publishing.

Decades later and convergence is all around us: in the boardroom, on the stock market, over the air and in your pocket. It's a terms used possibly too frequently and frivolously, and now has lost its prophetic meaning. Convergence can be stuck like a label on any product or service that a vendor chooses.

So just what is convergence in the technology industry?

Seventy-one per cent recognise it as the delivery of voice, video and data across all networks. Half of them think it also refers to the integration of fixed and mobile solutions. Fifty per cent again believe convergence relates to a device that provides all fixed and mobile voice and data services on a single handset.

So what is convergence anyway? - silicon.com