That BellSouth brand of practicality was on display at Supercomm 2005 in June, where attendees couldn't walk a stretch of the show floor without tripping over the word “convergence.” In a keynote address, Ackerman threw a little cold water on the concept.

“I don't want to rain on anyone's parade, but while everyone's talking about convergence, you need to keep in mind that for many customers, divergence may still be the reality,” Ackerman said. “If all we have accomplished with convergence is to put the same products on different pipes, we're adding very little value.”

That point of view is perhaps based on another reality of BellSouth's competitive situation: The ultimate convergence of wireline and wireless could be more difficult for the carrier, given that its mobile division, Cingular Wireless, is jointly owned by BellSouth (40%) and SBC Communications (60%). Ackerman acknowledged that fact in an interview but pointed out that BellSouth is not necessarily alone in that reality.

“I don't know that we would be able to achieve the exact same level of integration that we could if it were totally owned by us — but having said that, either can our competitors,” Ackerman said, referring to Vodafone's 45% stake in Verizon Wireless.

Still, BellSouth has embraced the IMS architecture for service convergence and is evaluating different ways its capabilities can be employed with a separate wireless network, Smith said, pointing to the inherent flexibility of IMS as an advantage for BellSouth's unique wireless situation. One alternative would be to build one complete infrastructure at the transport level and one at the control plane level to allow for separate control of BellSouth and Cingular facilities, Smith said. Another would be to build a common infrastructure but with multiple control plane capabilities and enough flexibility to allow either entity control with a maximum sharing of wireless infrastructure, he said.

Either way, BellSouth views IMS as early in its development but of critical importance to integrating VoIP capabilities that are inherently coming into wireline and wireless networks.

“I think we're at the starting point,” Smith said. “We need a new control architecture to manage and manipulate features. IMS presents a very good control architecture to bring these things together in an integrated way. It's a framework that can become the control architecture for a true multimedia environment. I don't think everything we need to do is defined today, but the work done on IMS seems to have a lot of architectural components we're looking for.”

One of the concepts at the core of BellSouth's strategic thinking about what technologies to deploy and what services to offer is the idea of simplicity for the user. Whether it's VoIP, broadband access or some form of video service, the carrier seeks to maximize ease of use — which Smith pointed out is inversely related to the technologies that power the applications.

“The things that are simpler for the user are a lot more complicated for the operator,” he said. “We're getting to a level of complexity that is rapidly going to outpace most of the population. We have to build simplicity again.”

In addition to simplicity of applications, BellSouth also evaluates its introduction of new services based on how different it can make the user experience, whether that's in terms of lower cost or an overall richer service. The carrier's realistic approach to VoIP service, for example, dictates that if it can't provide very enhanced applications and user capabilities at the same or lower price points using VoIP, then the technology is probably not ready for that particular consumer need.

Likewise for video service, which BellSouth wants to be able to redefine rather than rehash for its customers, Smith said.

“The thing I get really excited about is the potential to give customers a new and improved experience and an enhanced degree of control,” he said. “We could go out and say we're going to offer the same capability that digital cable and digital satellite has. But the thing that's the potential special sauce is if you can go out with something more like Microsoft TV — something new and exciting with more user control.”

Even though BellSouth's conservative growth and expansion strategy may make sense to shareholders, it does raise questions of exactly where the carrier goes from here. If nothing else, it creates a competitive perception issue about how to define BellSouth in the midst of what is quickly becoming a sea of monolithic providers with expansive nationwide networks.

“The whole merger thing makes it almost impossible to even compare growth numbers apples-to-apples,” said Martin of Ntelec. “But you have to have growth, and it's not clear to me what BellSouth is doing to grow.”

BellSouth itself maintains that the technological strength of its network and its investment in areas like IMS, FTTC, VoIP and WiMAX are clear indicators of its intended direction for growth, and that its strategy — while challenging — is as much about converged networks and advanced services as any other carrier.

“The broadband economy depends on the strength of converging networks,” Ackerman said. “We are focused on transforming BellSouth into a broadband, IP services leader. It's a tough task.”