 these cables can be cost justified. Whether or not this will happen remains to be seen. The telecommunications industry has never pursued the idea that a specialized network could offer its customers a competitive edge. The carriers (telecommunications service providers) have only cared about the conversations in progress from point A to point B, not about the business purposes for which the network was being used. There have been attempts at enhanced services available for 30 years, but now IP tech- nology is making them more affordable to deploy and in some cases, configurable by the user with a web interface. Now the network can be viewed as a platform for services such as In- teractive Voice Response, Automatic Call Distribution and 158 15 The Telecom Handbook CHAPTER 7 Voice Messaging Services, to name a few, for both business and residential customers. The networks can become competi- tive tools and the telecommunications carriers are now realizing the potential value that outside developers introduc- ing new applications may bring. Unfortunately, the unrealistic expectations for service demand and resulting overbuilding of telecommunications network ca- pacity starting around the year 2000 resulted in the bursting of a giant financial bubble and the demise of many telecommunica- tions companies selling both service and equipment. The short-term effect on the marketplace has been the continued re- duction in costs in a struggle to compete, but as companies start to give things away, it is not likely that they will be around to see the long-term effects of this telecommunications industry fiasco. Telecommunications service providers struggling for survival may miss the opportunities for specialization of their networks, al- though this may be a viable strategy with which to begin their recoveries. Applications-Based Convergence Concepts Adding Computer Supported Intelligence to the Traditional Telephone Call In addition to the Engineering Based Concepts of conver- gence, the other way that the term converge