The big news from 3GSM isn't mobile TV, HSDPA, new handsets, content deals or alliances. It's good old-fashioned convergence. Not the "you'll be able to send voice over the Internet" style convergence which has darkened fifty percent of all networking company press releases for the past ten years, but the real thing. Technologies that merely touched at the edges before are coming together like raindrops on glass and the true benefits of convergence are starting to appear. Not only does it cut costs and add simplicity, but it kick-starts entirely new ways to use technology — the most important driver in the industry.
Take Bluetooth. After a long and very uncertain start in life, marked mostly by high costs, incompatibilities and complexities, the standard has become a desirable tick-box item on mobile handsets primarily for headset use. Companies like CSR (Cambridge Silicon Radio, as was) have developed low-cost, high-performance, successful single-chip Bluetooth devices that have helped this process.
Now, however, CSR is moving Bluetooth ever closer to old enemy Wi-Fi. It used to be difficult to use both in the same device at once; they share the same frequency band and tend to jam each other. By a string of modifications to the way both systems work — without violating the standards — CSR has got the two co-operating to the point that the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi chips can sit side-by-side on the same circuit board while sharing the same antenna. The result will be mobile phones and PDAs that can move seamlessly between hotspots and cellular systems while working at full speed with Bluetooth headsets and data links — and that cost less to develop and build.
CSR will soon merge both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi onto a single very low power chip, at which point the number of handsets with both features will blossom. That will create a real market for smart VoIP systems for mobile handsets. Likewise, CSR will, as competitor Broadcom already has, merge Bluetooth with an FM radio receiver on the same chip. That's primarily because most phones with one feature also has the other, so converging them has obvious design and cost benefits — but when you add FM's radio data capabilities with systems like RDS you've created another channel to move information from a service provider to the consumer. That too will use IP, and that's no coincidence.
IMS — the IP Multimedia Subsystem — is the biggest engine of convergence going, or it will be, when the current revision is finished. It's the basis for the cross-network messaging initiative announced on Monday by the GSM Association...
