The concept of "convergence," a term once so hackneyed and tied to anticipated trends that didn't materialize on time that it became almost taboo, appears to be coming back into fashion these days. The idea reared its head last week at a conference in Chicago called (you guessed it) the Global Convergence Summit. Besides a lot of bellyaching by presenters about the frigid and snowy weather and the logic of holding a conference in Chicago in January, the dominant theme of the day was how network operators and technology developers should be melding mobility and VoIP efforts together.

The good news is that the new concentration on convergence transcends the idea of voice/data/video combinations (talk about passé) to embrace the still nascent notion of an underlying networking method that would bind together all manner of transmission, access and application. That's an important distinction, if you consider that convergence so far essentially has meant the roll-up of applications into a single service bundle, or even just the idea of a bunch of services collected on a single bill. That's not convergence from a network or technology perspective--that's just bundling. (Continued after ad) The fact that a dominant theme of much telecom industry discussion lately has been IMS, a strong emerging candidate for the aforementioned role of technological binder, is good news for proponents of the new convergence. But it also is likely to present the movement's biggest challenge: how to accomplish actual technological convergence while communicating that accomplishment to the users of the resulting services in a non-technological way. Tom Wheeler, the former head of the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association, made the point well at last week's conference: "People don't buy technology, they buy functionality. If in fact we're going to go to the next step in the substitution of wireless for fixed, this is the issue that has to be confronted."

So therein lies the challenge: make the intra-industry discussion and pursuit about how technology can support the convergence of all communication services, concentrating on the underlying protocols and networking methodologies that can meld all into one. Then take all the technology out of it and show the rest of the world why they should care. And let's be quick about it--we've been waiting a long time for this thing called convergence.

E-mail me at jmeyers@primediabusiness.com.