Convergence, broadly speaking, relates to several things. There is device convergence – your cellphone and PDA have converged into a smartphone, or is that your laptop and cellphone that have merged? There is convergence of voice and data onto the same networks. Some would argue that the mass move to online represents a convergence of services onto one platform.

The convergence that we’ve been waiting for in South Africa is that of voice and data. Various things have held this up – cost and quality of bandwidth, regulations, operator desire to hold on to lucrative revenues in one or the other sphere. VOIP, for example, offers significantly cheaper telephony to anyone with a ‘data’ line, but hasn’t been widely rolled out because it undercuts valuable voice revenue on mobile and fixed line networks.