Ridgeway bets on videoconferencing boom

Reading, England - As video over IP becomes more common, users face a problem: How to get old videoconferencing equipment to talk to new IP gear.

Start-up Ridgeway Systems & Software, Ltd. is working on an answer. The company is developing hardware and software to translate between the industry standard that governs ISDN videoconferencing, H.320, and the standard that rules video-over-IP connections, H.323.

Ridgeway's products will let users of ISDN videoconferencing hardware, the most common in use today, hold conferences with LAN-based IP videoconferencing, the wave of the future. "The amount of money spent on [ISDN] videoconferencing is significant and growing," said Steve Bland, sales and marketing director for Ridgeway. Customers are not likely to throw that gear away to switch to IP, he said.

In addition, regardless of which platform a corporation settles on, the firm is likely to want to set up videoconferences with other corporations, over whose equipment the corporation will have no control, Bland said.

Some regions of the U.S. are not served by ISDN but can be reached via IP networks. Extending interoperable IP videoconferencing to those non-ISDN areas would also require such a gateway.

Other vendors have been working on the same problem. For example, RADVision, Inc. makes a gateway that can handle both forms of videoconferencing. Each OnLAN L2W-323 gateway converts a circuit-switched call to packets for transport across an IP network. When OnLAN was released three years ago, the product was based on proprietary technology. Since then, RADVision has made the package compliant with H.320 and H.323.

But the RADVision box supports only four concurrent video calls. The boxes can be stacked to handle more simultaneous callers, and RADVision regards that capability as an advantage. Customers can buy into a single gateway for $10,000 and add additional gateways as demand rises, the company said.

Ridgeway plans to offer a gateway box for use in enterprise nets. The company will also build a higher capacity box that can fit in a carrier network, Bland said.

Beyond videoconferencing, the Ridgeway gateway will connect PBXs to IP networks, acting as a gateway to IP voice as well. This feature will allow corporate users to save money on intersite phone calls that can be carried over data networks without the need for more expensive public toll calls or dedicated voice circuits.

Ridgeway will base its gateways on Microsoft Corp.'s Windows NT servers because NT is becoming more common in both enterprise and carrier networks, according to Bland. PictureTel also bases its gateway, LiveGateway, on NT, but one server supports only four calls.

A spokesman said PictureTel had no immediate plans for a larger gateway to handle more sessions.

Ridgeway would not reveal more specifics of its enterprise and carrier product categories. It expects to ship products in about a year.

Ridgeway: 011 44 (0)7000 323 324

Ridgeway.

A review of videoconferencing tools
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