LOS ANGELES -- If you can put phone callers on hold, why not videoconferencers?
Call holding and message waiting are among the new features being added to the International Telecommunication Union's H.323 videoconferencing standard.
Jay Gilbert, a technical engineer at Intel's Architecture Labs in Hillsboro, Ore., told attendees of his Spring Internet World '99 session that H.323, an effort of the International Telecommunications Union, could see a third revision as early as this month.
A key goal is to make H.323 products easier to use and more efficient, Gilbert said.
He acknowledged H.323 has been slow to take off, in part because of concerns over its complexity, despite the efforts of companies such as Intel, which sell H.323 gear. Some companies are now looking to add multimedia capabilities based on the Session Initiation Protocol, a proposed standard by the Internet Engineering Task Force.
H.323, which was adopted as a standard in 1995, defines packet-based communication over digital transports. Originally designed for LANs, H.323 has gone through several changes to make it useful over WANs and the Internet.
In addition to the phone-like features, the new version will add a directory system that lets users look each other up by name instead of by numerical IP address and the ability to track connections for billing purposes. Gilbert said it would also use less server memory.
Gilbert said such features would bring H.323 closer to the functionality of the traditional phone system.
Intel Architecture Labs, a research arm of the microprocessor company, co-wrote several parts of H.323 and has pushed for its widespread adoption. The Intel Video Phone is based on the standard, as are other Intel multimedia products and research efforts.
