Videoconferencing heading down a path paved with IP

By Jeff Caruso AND Jason Meserve
Network World, 07/12/99

After years of big promise and little progress, videoconferencing is reinventing itself to become more relevant to today's businesses.

Vendors are expanding beyond the ISDN videoconferencing market with new IP wares, and they're pushing one-way video streaming as a stepping stone to two-way, interactive videoconferencing.

VTEL in coming months will release a software upgrade to its high-end videoconferencing systems to let them run video over IP.

Last month, VTEL released a video-streaming product and service set, and the company plans to follow up with a high-bandwidth version that can deliver higher-quality video.

Last week, White Pine Software shipped a new version of its MeetingPoint software for IP-based videoconferencing. The product lets more than two people participate in a video conference, and also allows for one-way video streaming.

FVC.Com last week announced a gateway that can route videoconferencing calls among IP, ISDN and ATM networks.

Meanwhile, videoconferencing mainstay PictureTel recently introduced a set of services to get companies up and running with streaming media over IP. Vendors hope the new focus on IP and streaming will get companies more interested in a technology that has floundered in recent years.

The reason for the slow progress seems to be that videoconferencing has been entirely possible but not always practical. With many companies consolidating their networks on IP, the initial ISDN-based implementations of videoconferencing look less appetizing.

Although there is an International Telecommunication Union standard for sending video over IP, dubbed H.323, the IP network infrastructure isn't quite ready to support the technology. Going from today's data-only networks to high-quality, two-way interactive video is a huge leap that many companies aren't willing to take.

"With IP networks, the quality of service (QoS) just isn't there," says David Passmore, research director at Net Reference.

On the other hand, he says, companies have made large investments in IP. Videoconferencing over ISDN does not take advantage of that investment.

"People are waiting for IP video to take off. They're waiting for a vendor to publicize a breakthrough that says videoconferencing is not going to take your network down," says David Horn, IT consultant at Entergy Services, an electric utility company in New Orleans.

Entergy didn't wait, and it uses virtual ISDN connections to run video to remote locations. But Horn hopes to test IP video soon. "That's where everything is going," he says.

Though users would prefer to run video over their IP networks, several hurdles stand in the way.

Video quality in IP networks remains an issue, says David Dines, an analyst with Aberdeen Group in Boston. Some users would be willing to accept lower picture quality if audio was good and the price was right, he says. "If you could get a half-decent image quality for $2,000 and put it in a conference room, would you do it? Most people would say 'Yes.' "

Another factor hampering IP videoconferencing is that the bandwidth requirements are slightly higher than those for running video over ISDN, says Mark Cowtan, director of marketing at FVC.Com.

ISDN videoconferencing is usually allocated 384K bit/sec, but an IP version of similar quality needs about 512K bit/ sec to allow for packet overhead and network delays, Cowtan notes. Network latency should stay below 200 milliseconds to keep quality high, he says.

Many companies would require an infrastructure upgrade to run IP videoconferencing.Industry watchers agree that video over IP should be preceded by a move to switched Ethernet and Fast Ethernet to the desktop and Layer 3 switches in the campus. On the service provider side, a QoS standard such as Differentiated Services needs to be implemented to ensure that video traffic can get through providers' networks in a timely fashion.

Because enterprises and service providers are just starting down these roads, industry watchers say it still may be several years before videoconferencing over IP takes off.

"There was a false start for IP videoconferencing a year and a half ago," says Elliot Gold, editor of Telespan, a newsletter on teleconferencing. Vendors hyped the technology, but the IP infrastructure wasn't ready, he says.

Videoconferencing companies have had to rethink their strategies to stir up interest. "I wouldn't disagree with the overall thesis that videoconferencing hasn't taken off," says Kevin Flanagan, director of corporate communications at PictureTel in Andover, Mass., Nevertheless, PictureTel does have a stable of large videoconferencing customers.

PictureTel last November completed its acquisition of Starlight Networks, which specializes in media streaming. PictureTel and other videoconferencing vendors hope that one-way video streaming - a somewhat less-demanding technology - will be the spark to get companies to install more video cameras and other equipment.

Once that gear is in place, the move to full-blown videoconferencing becomes less daunting. "Right now, we're seeing streaming media take off on the Internet," says Peg Landry, director of marketing at White Pine. "The next logical step is live, interactive video." o