As utility companies gradually migrate to this 21st century network, ensuring the support of existing and new applications is mission critical. Legacy traffic is integrated into the IP network using various techniques such as tunnelling and protocol translation, thereby allowing integration and migration to a fully converged IP infrastructure. So how can a water company benefit from the converged network? And what can new applications bring to the mix? The water utility now has the capability to extend the back office functionality out to all the locations within the company. In doing this they benefit from normalising corporate connectivity across all office- and field-based staff. No longer does the field worker have to use dial-up whils at an outstation or come back into the office for software updates. Connectivity available at the remote locations is the same as at the headquarters with laptop updates being pre-positioned so that bandwidth was not unnecessarily consumed. The laptop user has near LAN-like performance for the updates and critical files.