News & Press Release Archive

Broadband Week for September 7, 1998:

Videoconferencing Emerges for Ops

By FRED DAWSON    (9/7/98)

Recent developments in Internet-telecommunications technology suggest that videoconferencing is coming into its own as an opportunity for cable operators, well in advance of toll-quality packet-voice services.

Several Internet-service providers -- including at least one that is devoted to data access over cable -- are testing new iterations of software and hardware systems linked to the Internet-protocol telecommunications standard, H.323.

This step moves the value-added attraction of IP conferencing to market one year or more ahead of when most experts anticipate that H.323-based services will reach parity with the quality, features and ease of use of circuit-switched telephony.

"Videoconferencing technology is nearing the flash point where more and more consumer-oriented products are making it easy for service providers to market such services, especially where there's more bandwidth available," said Lior Haramaty, vice president for technical marketing at VocalTec Communications Ltd., a leading supplier of H.323 systems.

Early adopting ISPs said they see IP conferencing, with or without video, as a low-cost feature that can stand on its own as an appealing
service, or serve as a value-added incentive to draw customers to the cut-rate long-distance  voice services that many of them are selling.

"We're seeing significant interest from casual users, as well as the business community," said Donald Brown, executive vice president of
Houston-based Network-On-Line, an ISP subsidiary of Comtech Consolidation Group Inc.  NOL is using H.323 "gateway" software from White Pine Software Inc. to support "virtual-conference-room" services that can be rented by the hour, or leased on a full-time,
dedicated basis.

White Pine cofounder and "evangelist" Forrest Milkowski said a number of ISPs -- including the Time Warner Cable/MediaOne Road Runner high-speed-data venture, Worldcom Corp.'s UUNet and America Online Inc. -- are in beta trials of the latest releases of his firm's
"MeetingPoint" gateway software.

A major force behind the appeal of IP conferencing is the growing use of collaborative computing technology, noted Bryan Katz,
general manager of IP-business development at Lucent Technologies.

"When Microsoft [Corp.] began distributing 'NetMeeting' [its application-sharing software] at no charge, people got familiar with it and began putting it to use, which created a demand for audio and videoconferencing links over the data networks," he said.

With installations of H.323 gateways, corporations are able to extend conferencing to road warriors and branch offices that link in via
switched-circuit lines, added Eric Newman, group product manager for Data Beam Corp. That company is a supplier of products supporting shared computing, and it wrote many of the key algorithms for the T.120 multipoint-whiteboarding and data-collaboration standard.

"You want this technology to be able to interwork with the telephone network that is already in place," Newman said. "That's what H.323 is all about."

Market acclimation to the advantages of collaborative computing has spawned vendor development of ever more application-specific
tools, Newman added.

"We're seeing not just generic business-conference tools, like NetMeeting, but very specialized products for tele-medicine, distance learning and other segments -- really compelling applications that people are buying into," he said.

Another phenomenon working in sync with collaborative computing to drive demand for conferencing capabilities in the data stream is
the raging success of virtual-private-network  technology. Here, software employing IP PPTP (point-to-point tunneling protocol) and other innovations extends the advantages of private  networking over public networks to even the smallest companies.

"As private companies explore the use of collaborative computing with conferencing, ISPs are saying, 'You're already buying service from
us, so let us supply you with conferencing services along with your VPN,'" Milkowski said.

This is a development path that the @Work unit of @Home Network sees as it implements VPN technology in conjunction with offering
telecommuting services, said Don Hutchison, senior vice president and general manager of @Work.

"Conferencing is down the road a ways for us, but we see it as a natural extension of the benefits that we can deliver with our     telecommuting services over broadband connections," Hutchison added.

One of the reasons why ISPs are moving into the conferencing business is because the new tools have significantly reduced the management hassles that have traditionally been associated with conferencing, allowing providers to cost-effectively supply outsourced services to companies that are too small to run conferencing themselves.

For example, in the case of White Pine, its MeetingPoint software, which works with any H.323-compliant client, supports "audio
switching," where the document referenced by the person talking -- and also the person's image, if video is involved -- is automatically
displayed on the screens of participating parties, Milkowski noted.

In addition, the software can manage bandwidth allocations to fit the access speeds of individual users.

Thus, in the case of NOL, users accessing the ISP's virtual conference room over ISDN (integrated services digital network) lines can
automatically communicate with customers on dial-up lines, without requiring special setup preparations by NOL.

Brown said widespread public acceptance of  Southwestern Bell Telephone Co.'s ISDN service  has made videoconferencing a much more appealing product than would be the case if it were only offered over standard dial-up lines.

"[Videoconferencing] is a very attractive service over full-rate [128 kilobit-per-second] ISDN," he  added.

"We know ADSL [asymmetrical digital subscriber line] is coming, but the popularity of ISDN here is keeping us focused on the                 immediate opportunity," Brown said.

Cable companies, which are experimenting with a number of vendors in preparations for rolling out IP-telecommunications services, have been unusually quiet about such tests, even in discussions among themselves.

But vendors made it clear that the cable industry is leading the parade toward the wide-scale use of IP technology to deliver a full slate of
telephone services, going well beyond the discount long-distance services that have driven the early success of IP voice.

"This is getting very hot in cable right now," noted George Foley, director of broadband networks at Lucent, which, like other vendors      working with cable, is developing packet converters that will feed calls from standard phones directly into cable modems.

"This is not a game of trying to save a penny on a call," Foley added. "Collaborative calling and call centers are helping to redefine what voice technology is."

A key factor in making conferencing an attractive business for service providers is the ability to interface the H.323 IP domain with the
embedded, high-cost packet-conferencing  systems based on the H.320 protocol, which many corporations already have in place, thereby allowing them to cost-effectively extend conferencing beyond the reach of their private networks and conference rooms.

Products in this vein have been oriented toward single-corporate-user requirements, but they are being expanded to accommodate the delivery of integrated conferencing services by service providers to multiple users.

For example, Lucent will bring out a more scaleable version of its H.323/H.320 integration platform -- the "Multimedia Communications   Exchange Server," or "MMCX" -- early next year, Katz said, adding, "We're being tested by several service providers."

The MMCX -- an Internet call center with 500 ports -- will also become easier to use in conjunction with H.320 systems, simplifying   session-management tasks such as the allocation of encoding algorithms for specific users across the two conferencing domains,                Katz said.

With such gains in the offing, he added, the real gating issue for service providers and system vendors alike is market familiarity with the
benefits of integrated data and conferencing applications.

"What we've found is that this is an 'aha' kind of sell, where once people get first-hand experience with the applications, the light goes on," Katz said

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