The coming convergence

My comrades, welcome to the great day of the grand unification! At last, all information will flow through the glorious Unity Pipeline to our homes and businesses! No more terrible decisions that rent nations apart, forced brother against brother, in choosing service plans!

As you all well recall, the Great Sundering of the 1980s was finally made right on the first day of the New Devolution, which we count from Dec. 29, 2006, starting as Year 1 A.T. (ante telephonum). Mere days later came the birth of the Perfect Device, what our beloved Jobs, may he be blessed in our memory, called the iPhone.

Today, the final pieces are in place. Our broadband data run at a magnificent trillion bits per second, and our telephony—sorry, telepathy, it’s so easy to slip into the old terminology—works wherever we are with every other human being. Not like there’s a choice. And we can receive 501 television channels! Such advances.

Let us raise our iPhone 9.0’s to the sky, and bow our heads in praise of AT&T&T, our Great American Telephone & Telegraph & Telepathy overlord.

OK, perhaps I exaggerate…

While the future may not turn out quite to be the dystopian vision I outline above, there’s a juggernaut of momentum toward convergence—the combination of different kinds of services into one lump, one bill, and one company offering it. The iPhone, announced by Steve Jobs in January and shipping this June, fits neatly into the new AT&T’s strategy in that regard.

Convergence as a broad term describes how voice and video are becoming just one more kind of data service, not unique services that need separate wires and equipment that’s handled differently than straight broadband. With a single cable to your home—whether phone wire, coaxial cable, or a fiber-optic strand—you can already get what formerly required three unique connections, if not more.

read more:

http://www.macworld.com/news/2007/02/02/convergence/index.php