Many remote workers already rely on the presence capability in instant-messaging tools to maintain a live link with team members. Yet barriers remain that prevent video collaboration from taking hold in the workplace, and early adopters are not utilizing it as effectively as they could be.
There’s no doubt personal videoconferencing tools can enhance remote employees’ communication and productivity. Video ties together disparate and often isolated workers by letting physical, visual nuances shine through. Once cost-prohibitive and complex, today’s IP-based systems are making face-to-face communications available to anyone with a $100 Webcam.
Many remote workers already rely on the presence capability in instant-messaging tools to maintain a live link with team members. Yet barriers remain that prevent video collaboration from taking hold in the workplace, and early adopters are not utilizing it as effectively as they could be.
Countrywide, a financial services firm in Calabasas, Calif., is rolling out Arel Communications & Software’s Integrated Conferencing Platform (ICP) to provide voice, video and data conferencing services to its 4,500 remote salespeople and branch-office workers. Because the firm plans to expand to 11,000 salespeople by year-end 2005, it’s driven to make corporate communications and training more accessible, says Teri Hampton, assistant vice president in charge of distance learning for Countrywide.
“[Our] salespeople don’t come into a branch facility or the central office to get training and the corporate communications that are required for their job. They need to connect from home, Realtors’ offices or wherever they are,” Hampton says.
Although Arel’s ICP is capable of two-way video, Countrywide won’t use that feature anytime soon. Instead, it will rely on Arel’s two-way voice capability to save the cost of a phone call into the central bridge, and develop training sessions that will be broadcast from instructor to student.
“We’re not doing two-way video [yet] because the Internet is not great for that right now,” Hampton says, noting that many Countrywide salespeople use dial-up connections. “We’ll probably be looking at that with some of the video compression that Arel is working on.”
Eric Tveter, COO and executive vice president of MasTech, a construction company in Coral Gables, Fla., says videoconferencing helps improve business communications. Yet Tveter says the majority of his video use is personal. He uses SightSpeed’s Video Messenger to stay in touch with his young son while on the road.
“As long as I have a broadband connection – which a lot of hotels have now in every room – I can stay connected to my family,” Tveter says.
So what’s preventing wide-scale adoption? A number of factors, both technical and cultural.
Bandwidth
For video, bandwidth can be a three-headed monster. “For a basic 15-frame-per-second video call at one-quarter screen resolution, the Internet is a capable network,” says Christine Perey, principal of Perey Research and Consulting and a 10-year user of videoconferencing technology. “I’ve proven to myself and many people that [the Internet] is suitable for certain video experiences.”
More problematic is the last mile on each end of the connection. The Telework Consortium says for video collaboration to be effective, T-1-like speeds that support videoconferencing at 768K bit/sec or better are required. The group is pushing for Fiber to the Home and other high-speed broadband technologies.
On the corporate end, many firms use T-1 connections to the office, which is adequate for e-mail and downloads, but not video. If companies are serious about video, they’ll need to invest in bigger pipes to the Internet, says John Starke, president of the Telework Consortium.
Companies that require a quality-of-service level can subscribe to a dedicated video network such as GlowPoint, where each end of the connection is T-1 or better, and the central network carries only video traffic. Another option is to access (if possible) the Internet2 research network, which has better connectivity and is unencumbered by the daily grind of e-mail, Web surfing and file downloading.
Firewalls and NAT
Many IP videoconferencing technologies rely on User Datagram Protocol (UDP) to transmit between sites. But strict firewall implementations sometimes block UDP. When the Telework Consortium tried to hook up a video call between the office of telework advocate Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) and a suburban telework center, Capitol Hill’s IT staff prevented UDP packets from going through for security reasons.
VCON and Ridgeway have developed technologies that help pass video traffic through such barriers. But because corporate network security practices are non-negotiable, the industry could help spur adoption by developing more network-friendly protocols.
Network address translation (NAT) causes a related problem. NAT, which many small-office routers use to provide multiple PCs Internet access via one IP address, lets video calls go out but not come in.
Dialing schemes
How to connect is another challenge. Do you use an IP address, e-mail or some other sort of code? There’s still no standard dialing standard for connecting video users.
But presence technology could remedy this. Many videoconferencing firms are integrating presence into their systems, which lets a user select a name from a list and hit “conference” to connect to him.
Camera-shy
Finally, many remote workers bristle at the idea of being watched. The expansion of consumer-level video devices should help business users become more comfortable with the technology. To ease into it, they can begin by using video to chat with people they know.
