They were all words bandied about frequently at lectures yesterday during the 2009 Global Network Interconnectivity (GNI) Project Symposium at the University of Otago School of Business.
About 50 of New Zealand's leading academics and industry leaders gathered to discuss present and future issues relating to convergence in the Information, Communications and Technology (ICT) and telecommunications arena.
University of Otago Science Department head of information and telecommunications programme director Prof Martin Purvis said telecommunications technologies and internet services were experiencing unprecedented growth.
Technological advances, together with the growing scale of deployments, were driving rapid change in the telecommunications arena and all these factors had contributed to the push towards convergence on the network core.
Next generation networks, programmable networks, and the converged core will open up and provide new network architectures and new converged service opportunities, Prof Purvis said.
The GNI Project in Information Science Department was established at the University of Otago in 2006 to develop expertise, provide knowledge sharing and conduct activities supporting new ICT technologies which contribute to telecommunications, multimedia, and information systems convergence.
Speakers included Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs researcher Dr Hakim Hacid, of France; Telecom New Zealand head of security Dr Malcolm Shore; realXtend Project community manager and lead architect Ryan McDougall; Erdödy Consultancy Ltd director Nicolás Erdödy; Harmonic chief technology officer Peter Chappell and several lecturers from the Universities of Otago and Canterbury.
