Question

Caisy Wong is the owner of a small catalog company that imports a variety of clothes and houseware from several Asian countries and sells them to its customers over the Web and by telephone through a traditional catalog. She has read about the convergence of voice and data and is wondering about changing her current traditional, separate, and rather expensive telephone and data services into one service offered by a new company that will supply both telephone and data over her Internet connection. What are the potential benefits and challenges that Asia Importers should consider in making the decision about whether to move to one integrated service?

Answer 1

The benefits are:
Move to one integrated service would reduce costs considerably.
It will also help maintain a single device for all services, data telefone and others
It will lead to less phone call costs as VoIP is cheaper
Since the convergence provides added benefit of storing data at the same place, it will help importers such as her not to rummage for data in different devices.
Convergence provides new technological products such as live monitoring of logistics etc

The challenges are:
One needs to spend some times to understand how the technology works.
There is a more chance of a single company knowing much about you and leakage of data.
This also leads to more cyber crime due to transfer of data over network.