Define the advantages and disadvantages of convergence of technology?
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The advantage of a converged network is that both telephony and data ride on the same infrastructure. If that’s done right, it costs less to operate than two sets of infrastructure. Of course, there are still companies that manage to mess that up.
The disadvantage of a converged network is that you’ve put all of your eggs in one basket: if the network has a problem, then both data and telephony feel the affects. We call this fate sharing. It also means that all of the antiquated employees who you have on staff that have spent their lives running the telephony network are redundant. In general, they will not be capable of being retrained to help run the converged network as they are too stuck in the old ways to accept retraining. Further, they’re likely to be union workers, so essentially can’t be fired. You’ll likely have to pay them to drink coffee for the rest of the careers.
The economics of this are so compelling that I don’t know of a single company still running dual networks. And that shows just how old and pointless this textbook question really is.
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Elnur Mammadov, System Architect (2017-present)
Updated Feb 25, 2018
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for the masses, all in all it seems very advantageous, you get everything over packet switched network; voice, video, and data (without going into too much details like QoS[1], essentially everything becomes data from the networks perspective, in the real world everything is data anyways, from human’s brain perspective).
in the future the network will be IPv6 [2]only;
all services will be fiber optics, physically two or more fiber optic cores will be entering any given property for redundancy[3];
moreover wireless services will converge as well, most of the radio spectrum[4] available will be used for the future converged wireless service, this includes frequency bands currently used for TV and even AM/FM radio.
for data centers, it’s advantageous as well, again triple play - voice, video, and data, converged networks are much more efficient and cheaper to run at the datacenter or corporate level;
there are more things to worry about, like SAN[5], which I think is going to be replaced with a storage system like VMware vSAN[6], GlusterFS[7] or a similar system.
Footnotes
[1] Quality of service - Wikipedia
[2] IPv6 - Wikipedia
[3] N+1 redundancy - Wikipedia
[4] Radio spectrum - Wikipedia
[5] Storage area network - Wikipedia
[6] VMware vSAN powers industry-leading Hyper-Converged Infrastructure solutions with a vSphere-native, high-performance architecture.
[7] Gluster - Wikipedia
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Richard Comroe, Scientist, inventor, engineer, professor, VP
Answered Mar 7, 2018
Read other answers that observed convergence of telephone & computer networks. No argument, they all had it right. My contribution is in broadening or generalizing the convergence. I came from radio. We didn’t observe anything different, but observed it more broadly … both wired and wireless. When you step back it’s not the convergence of 2 land based networks, but the convergence of all communications from disparate analog networks to common digital. Our favorite expression is that the transport of a bit of data is identical regardless of what service that bit was part of (TV, voice, radio, computer, image).
I am always taken when someone observes that dedicated cameras, calculators, and media players are all disappearing, having been incorporated into smartphones. I don’t understand how the “phone” automatically owns the identity of the multi-function device everyone carries. It’s equally valid to say that dedicated phones have disappeared having been incorporated into the smartcamera that everyone carries.
In truth it’s no more a phone than a camera than a computer than a media player than anything else. What it IS is a consolidation of all applications into a common digital platform, communicable across a common digital network. People and organizations DO run separate networks or separate devices, all the time, all around us, for varieties of reasons of priority, or dedication, or isolation, even where their only difference may be in their individual instantiation, while being otherwise identical.
The advantage of a converged network is that both telephony and data ride on the same infrastructure. If that’s done right, it costs less to operate than two sets of infrastructure. Of course, there are still companies that manage to mess that up.
The disadvantage of a converged network is that you’ve put all of your eggs in one basket: if the network has a problem, then both data and telephony feel the affects. We call this fate sharing. It also means that all of the antiquated employees who you have on staff that have spent their lives running the telephony network are redundant. In general, they will not be capable of being retrained to help run the converged network as they are too stuck in the old ways to accept retraining. Further, they’re likely to be union workers, so essentially can’t be fired. You’ll likely have to pay them to drink coffee for the rest of the careers.
The economics of this are so compelling that I don’t know of a single company still running dual networks. And that shows just how old and pointless this textbook question really is.
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Elnur Mammadov, System Architect (2017-present)
Updated Feb 25, 2018
Continue Reading
for the masses, all in all it seems very advantageous, you get everything over packet switched network; voice, video, and data (without going into too much details like QoS[1], essentially everything becomes data from the networks perspective, in the real world everything is data anyways, from human’s brain perspective).
in the future the network will be IPv6 [2]only;
all services will be fiber optics, physically two or more fiber optic cores will be entering any given property for redundancy[3];
moreover wireless services will converge as well, most of the radio spectrum[4] available will be used for the future converged wireless service, this includes frequency bands currently used for TV and even AM/FM radio.
for data centers, it’s advantageous as well, again triple play - voice, video, and data, converged networks are much more efficient and cheaper to run at the datacenter or corporate level;
there are more things to worry about, like SAN[5], which I think is going to be replaced with a storage system like VMware vSAN[6], GlusterFS[7] or a similar system.
Footnotes
[1] Quality of service - Wikipedia
[2] IPv6 - Wikipedia
[3] N+1 redundancy - Wikipedia
[4] Radio spectrum - Wikipedia
[5] Storage area network - Wikipedia
[6] VMware vSAN powers industry-leading Hyper-Converged Infrastructure solutions with a vSphere-native, high-performance architecture.
[7] Gluster - Wikipedia
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Richard Comroe, Scientist, inventor, engineer, professor, VP
Answered Mar 7, 2018
Read other answers that observed convergence of telephone & computer networks. No argument, they all had it right. My contribution is in broadening or generalizing the convergence. I came from radio. We didn’t observe anything different, but observed it more broadly … both wired and wireless. When you step back it’s not the convergence of 2 land based networks, but the convergence of all communications from disparate analog networks to common digital. Our favorite expression is that the transport of a bit of data is identical regardless of what service that bit was part of (TV, voice, radio, computer, image).
I am always taken when someone observes that dedicated cameras, calculators, and media players are all disappearing, having been incorporated into smartphones. I don’t understand how the “phone” automatically owns the identity of the multi-function device everyone carries. It’s equally valid to say that dedicated phones have disappeared having been incorporated into the smartcamera that everyone carries.
In truth it’s no more a phone than a camera than a computer than a media player than anything else. What it IS is a consolidation of all applications into a common digital platform, communicable across a common digital network. People and organizations DO run separate networks or separate devices, all the time, all around us, for varieties of reasons of priority, or dedication, or isolation, even where their only difference may be in their individual instantiation, while being otherwise identical.
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