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January 02, 2007
att Rediscovers Convergence
The Wall Street Journal today features an article on att's acquistion of BellSouth and the use of Cingular to create a unified communication strategy. When the companies were not merged att treated wireless services as a seperate company.
In the discussion of the new att that includes the wireless world. The discussion focused on corporate customers getting the benefit of a unified service, consumers getting advertising and even a fixed mobile convergence strategy.
In the US this will be an interesting lesson. First of all Verizon has had the same issue with Vodafone as the partner on the Verizon Wireless side.
Buying bundles has not been a strategy that Sprint found successful, and it is for that reason that we know have the spin off Embarq.
As att converges, sprint divests and verizon looks to become whole, I ask the question what makes a converged service valuable?
CallWave has a nice application that I believe does a better job keeping customers loyal. The service is a call screening application for your wireline or wireless phone. As a converged strategy, I believe it fits the criteria of both unified communication and fixed mobile convergence. Its simple call forwarding with a media server and its almost as elegant as Skype. If they were open to giving the industry an API for it I believe they would gain an order of magnitude of customers. And who knows maybe Ed Whitacre will be mentioning them in the next article.
Posted by carl at January 2, 2007 09:24 AM