Convergência: separação de acesso e serviços

Interessante artigo de Geoff Hustons: Convergence?:

Perhaps its time to forget about convergence, and instead look at what it takes to survive as a carrier ISP in today’s deregulated, competitive, unconverged world. Certainly one of the more important principles is to stop attempting to add value to the network by spending large amounts of effort in providing a panoply of services that customers simply don’t want and don’t value. It would appear that want customers want today is for packet carriers to stick to the basics - keep overheads low and operate a network that is simple, stable, fast and cheap. User value construction is happening at the edge of the network through overlay structures, and the major attribute of networks today is not convergence per se, but the ability to open the network’s edge up for competitive innovation.

It appears that vertically integrated service providers are fading away, and convergence is fading away with it. The deregulated service industry continues to specialize rather than generalize. Valued service delivery is increasingly based on overlay systems that treat the network as a simple packet transmission service. The harsh lesson here is that the converged Utopia of the old world carrier industry is now no more than a piece of nostalgic mythology. And a rather dull and uninteresting one at that. The unconverged service world of layered applications is vibrant, innovative, exciting and very much alive . And maybe that’s a very good thing.

Para chegar as estas conclusões, o artigo elabora uma comparação do sonho que existe desde a década de 90 em que as operadoras iriam implementar uma rede única ligando voz, vídeo e dados e oferecer todos estes serviços verticalizados e integrados.

O artigo mostra que este sonho não se realizou com ISDN, nem com ATM, mas está se realizando de uma outra forma pela sociedade. A queda do valor das empresas de telecom e suas rentabilidades estão representando isto, e os players que agregam os serviços sobre IP estão aumentando seu valor (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Skype, eBay, etc).

Ou seja, as teles vão ter que aprender a ser ISPs apenas, e abandonar o sonho da solução vertical (e com isso parar de gastar dinheiro com isso). E que sejam ISPs eficientes, pois a concorrência para esta commodity só tende a aumentar (acesso sem fio, fibra, PLC, TV a cabo, etc.).