IP video adds oomph to mature technology

"Are we there yet?"

The familiar child's pleading, which comes up during most road trips, is apropos for the land of videoconferencing. As the cliché goes, people have been waiting for videoconferencing to "get here" since the 1964 World's Fair, where AT&T demonstrated the first videophone.

Despite the annual predictions that this is the year, videoconferencing, IP-based video in particular, is growing steadily. A recent survey of more than 600 videoconferencing users by Wainhouse Research shows almost 14% of respondents doing all their conferencing over IP today. Over the next 24 months, that number is expected to double to about 28%. The number of respondents with some form of IP videoconferencing deployed is almost 60%.

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"Are we there yet?"

The familiar child's pleading, which comes up during most road trips, is apropos for the land of videoconferencing. As the cliché goes, people have been waiting for videoconferencing to "get here" since the 1964 World's Fair, where AT&T demonstrated the first videophone.

Despite the annual predictions that this is the year, videoconferencing, IP-based video in particular, is growing steadily. A recent survey of more than 600 videoconferencing users by Wainhouse Research shows almost 14% of respondents doing all their conferencing over IP today. Over the next 24 months, that number is expected to double to about 28%. The number of respondents with some form of IP videoconferencing deployed is almost 60%.

It's not just large organizations; small companies also use videoconferencing.

Cheryl Posey, a speech pathologist and sole proprietor of Speaking Your Best in Dayton, Ohio, uses SightSpeed's Video Messenger to assess and work with roughly half her clients via the Internet. Clients use a Web-based version of Messenger to connect with Posey over a broadband connection. They don't need a Webcam on their end, it's more important they see and hear her with as little latency as possible.

"When watching me speak, they need to be able to watch my lips and see my tongue to form a sound," Posey says. She adds she can just listen to them and know what they're doing right or wrong.

After evaluating a few options, she chose SightSpeed for its ease of use (the client just goes to a Web page; no client to download and install) and price. She pays for the monthly service ($4.95 per month), and the clients pay nothing. "This makes it easy. They're [connected] in about 10 seconds," Posey says.

Further proof that video has matured: Mars, the company that makes M&Ms, used the benefits of IP video to help sell a Multi-protocol Label Switching (MPLS) network to connect its major global sites, including headquarters in England and the U.S. "[IT] pulled for video to be on it because it gave a greater economic argument for installing the MPLS network," says Richard Norris, conferencing manager for Mars. Saving "millions of dollars" in ISDN charges helped as well. The idea behind MPLS is to steer IP traffic onto a variety of routes to avoid congestion or failures, or to enable a particular class of service or guaranteed service level.

Mars recently began making the switch from using strictly ISDN video to putting calls over the newly installed MPLS-based network. Norris says about 195 of 390 endpoints now are converged onto the IP network but still have ISDN available as failover.

Finding religion

IP video is an important communication tool for the Church of Latter Day Saints in Salt Lake City, which has 12 million members worldwide. "In 2003, we did over 3,000 calls," says Dave Christensen, senior videoconference engineer, adding that most are international. "Some days are heavier than others, and calls can range from 15 minutes to over six hours."

The church has about 70 endpoints, 50 of them overseas. Christensen says the organization is in the process of rolling out an IP-based VPN to connect its sites and is moving away from ISDN where possible. Cost savings is part of the equation, but reliability is another. "We're finding that international IP connections tend to be more reliable than international ISDN," he says.

With ISDN, there could be four or five providers involved and that can lead to a host of issues, inducing problems with ISDN bonding (combining multiple ISDN channels for increased bandwidth) and strange connection behavior. "For a long time, we could not call Brazil but they could call us," Christensen says. He discovered the problem was the way one service provider handed off calls to a third party.

He saw the increased reliability in IP within the past year, as Tandberg and Polycom, whose equipment Christensen uses, rolled out new releases that support the same core standards for communication (H.323), encryption (Advanced Encryption Standard) and data sharing (H.239).

Norris and Christensen say ISDN still will play a role in their communications efforts, especially in locations where bandwidth is tough to come by or prohibitively expensive.