of Internet channels. Over time, it appears that all networks will converge to Internet technology, with its central TCP/IP network protocol at the core of all communications.

In telecommunications, convergence started when the concept of adding data capabilities to mobile phones emerged. At the beginning, i.e. from the mid-1990 until about 2003, data were added to voice using special protocols specific to the telecommunications industry, as represented by its main body of standardization, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). In spite of its name, that institute is now fully international; it just happens that the now prevalent GSM standard in mobile telephony started in Europe. Over time, a pressure started to be felt by mobile telecom operators to give access to Web resources, which are on the Internet. Therefore, standards started to evolve in the direction of providing capabilities like Web browsing to mobile handsets.

During about the same time, new standards emerged from a totally different origin, the US-based Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Under the barbaric name of 802.11, those standards specified means to extend the Internet to mobile devices. The public is now familiar with Wi-Fi, one of these radio standards.

Once personal electronic devices where linked by radio to the Internet, something remarkable happened. For a while, the computer industry had been working on carrying voice over the Internet, by chopping voice into pieces that could be sent on the network using TCP/IP and then reconstituted at the end in order to replay the voice at the other side. This is now quite known as Voice-over-IP (VoIP). If you are for example a user of Skype or Vonage at home, you’re using Voice-over-IP. Et voila, a computer, or any device with Wi-Fi, could now play the role of a telephone!

To finish the story for now, we need to come back to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute. When the first mobile telecommunications networks were established, they were dedicated to voice. Voice does not necessitate large network capacity (called bandwidth) for each voice channel. So, the original GSM network was good to carry voice, but not good for carrying data. To expand their networks to carry more data, a new generation of networks was developed by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (in fact, not only them, but we’ll keep things simple here) called third generation, or 3G for short. At the same time, the Internet was explosively expanding, and 3G very rapidly took a path to provide Internet services on mobile handset via TCP/IP. Et voila encore, a phone handset, or any personal electronic device with 3G, could now play the role of a computer!

All of this is still is being sorted out at the time of this writing, but one conclusion is already forgone. TCP/IP has won the battle of the networks, and the Internet is the worldwide standard for communications, be it for voice or data.

As we’ve discussed, financial networks, for example, as used for inter-bank settlements, are private networks. The same is true for the parts of financial networks that deal with chip card usage by consumers for payment at point-of-sale terminals. Today, payment on the Internet is in fact an expansion of the traditional model of payment on point-of-sale terminals. Simply, the Internet stands as the wire between the card and the point-of-sale terminal situated with the Internet merchant or its agent. As fraud on the Internet expands and chip cards are introduced to palliate it, Europay Mastercard Visa (EMV) smart cards will first be used to talk with remote point-of-sale terminals, and eventually will directly go to the acquirer gateway. Concerning inter-bank networks, they are private to the financial world, which means that they are not connected to

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