The intelligent MCU

Multimedia began its formidable entry into the communications industry with the rise of videoconferencing in the 1980s. Since then, approximately 100,000 room video systems and roll-abouts have been sold, as well as about 40,000 multipoint control unit ports for multisite conferencing. The introduction of desktop conferencing in the mid-1990s gave multimedia even more vitality by making it accessible to virtually anyone with a PC.

The release of the ITU's H.320 standard created a common protocol for communication between different vendors' products and, consequently, stimulated a move away from the proprietary systems that previously characterized the industry. The standards campaign has continued with the ratification of the H.323 and H.324 standards for conferencing across networks.

Hundreds of thousands of desktop and personal systems meeting ITU standards have been sold since the advent of desktop conferencing, and it is anticipated that millions of units will be sold during the next few years as a new era of multimedia communications unfolds.

With the large volume deployment of desktop systems on the horizon, multimedia is having a profound effect on organizational communication, both internally among employees and externally with vendors and customers. As organizations quickly realize the benefits of a dynamic and collaborative conferencing environment, multimedia is on its way to becoming a mainstream telecom mechanism.

Opportunities in multimedia During the last few years, carriers all over the world have begun to recognize the potential for a multimedia-based mass communications market. With worldwide efforts to deregulate or liberalize telecommunications, both established carriers and new market entrants are turning to multimedia communications to gain a competitive advantage.

By offering enhanced services such as multipoint multimedia conferencing and gateway services, carriers are expanding the breadth of services offered to customers while successfully distinguishing themselves from the competition.

Multipoint multimedia conferencing services have already become an important differ- entiation for many carriers, even though the market for these services is still in its infancy. All the major long- distance carriers in the U.S.-including Sprint, AT&T, MCI and Frontier-and the majority of Bell companies have initiated multipoint services, and many have begun to expand their initial offerings.

Internationally, most of the major European PTTs-BT, France Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, Dutch PTT Telecom and others-have initiated similar offerings. Many other PTTs are following suit with competing services. In addition, several new independent service providers have emerged from all over the world with the specific goal of offering multipoint services.

This upsurge in the availability of multipoint offerings is not only an attempt by carriers to gain a competitive edge but also an effort to capitalize on an extremely lucrative business opportunity: Profits can be derived from both port usage and network time.

Telespan Publishing Corp. reports that the average price offered by U.S. carriers is $45 per port hour on the MCU-the central switching hub that enables live, interactive multimedia communication between two or more endpoints (Figure 1). Add to this the price of several ISDN channels and the result is very profitable. For example, a four-way multimedia conference operating at 384 kb/s would derive profits from usage of four MCU ports as well as from 12 basic rate ISDN connections.

Multimedia gateway services, which enable communication between endpoints running dissimilar technologies, also use a profit model based on port usage and network time. While these gateway services are surfacing at a somewhat slower pace than multipoint offerings, analysts predict that gateway services will represent an even bigger opportunity for carriers as the market matures. This is because the gateway capability is important for two-party multimedia calls as well as multiparty calls.

With the demand for multimedia communications increasing rapidly and carriers readily preparing to meet this demand, multimedia eventually could achieve mainstream use. But carriers acknowledge that there is still a long road ahead before this can occur.

Today, a large number of problems are associated with multimedia communications, particularly for organizations that manage their own in-house multimedia equipment and networks. The challenge, and the opportunity, for carriers is to deliver a solution that will be as easy-to-use, reliable and inexpensive as a normal telephone call.

Obstacles The problems facing multimedia today are best illustrated by looking at industry statistics on call set-up within organizations running their own multimedia operations. These problems represent a business opportunity for carriers that can offer organizations a superior solution.

Approximately 30% of today's point-to-point multimedia calls experience problems during set-up, according to DesigNET International, a Boston-based consulting firm that optimizes multimedia conferencing network operations for organizations with in-house facilities.

Multipoint calls are even more complex, with set-up problems occurring in about 60% of calls. In anticipation of these problems, network managers allocate an average of 20 minutes to set up point-to-point calls and up to 50 minutes to set up multipoint calls.

Clearly, multimedia calls are not simple or reliable. Moreover, in-house facilities require greater operational resources and have higher costs.

Multimedia calls are difficult to set up for a couple of reasons. First, the bandwidth capability, video resolution, frame rate, audio compression algorithm and network must be identical for each endpoint participating in a conference. Bringing all the endpoints to a common set of parameters is a lengthy process that requires the participation of a technical expert at set-up.

The second problem stems from different interpretations of the ITU H.320 standards by different vendors. Even subtle differences can complicate the connection process-and again, technical expertise is required to resolve the differences.

Organizations with in-house facilities have taken a variety of measures to reduce set-up problems.

One common solution is nailed-down conferencing, which involves a closed network with dedicated connections between endpoints and fixed conference parameters. Because the environment is essentially unchanged from conference to conference, the probability of successful set-up is significantly greater. The problem is that nailed-down conferencing only works in a closed environment and, consequently, does not allow for the spontaneous or flexible use of multimedia communication.

For users with flexible calling patterns, pre-conference testing is a popular method of curtailing failures during set-up. Test calls usually are made a day or two before the scheduled call to ensure that the participating endpoints connect to each other smoothly. If problems are encountered, there is still sufficient time to resolve them before the actual call takes place.

Again, this solution does not allow for spontaneous calling. It also inflates operational overhead costs because testing is a labor-intensive process requiring skilled technicians. Operational overhead becomes especially high when multipoint conferencing is involved.

Assuming a five year life cycle for an MCU, DesigNET estimates that the overhead costs for maintaining and operating the MCU will be five times higher for an organization than the initial capital cost for the system. To reduce the burden on operational resources and improve call set-up success, many organizations are opting to outsource their multimedia communications needs to carriers.

Of course, carriers are not immune to the operational difficulties associated with multimedia communications. But the difficulties are much less pervasive for an expert service organization that has the infrastructure and training to resolve problems quickly and effectively.

Ironically, as the industry grows and diversifies, it actually is becoming more difficult to establish a convenient, on-demand conferencing environment that is also economical. The cause is the constant influx of new, and often incompatible, multimedia technologies into the market.

In spite of intensive interoperability testing, these incompatibility problems are expected to continue during the next few years as new vendors-with new interpretations-climb on the H.320 bandwagon.

To complicate matters even more, the ITU recently approved the H.323 and H.324 standards for multimedia conferencing over a local area network, the Internet or the public network. Product introductions were quick to follow, and today, approximately half of all endpoints sold are based on LAN or public network technologies.

Unfortunately, by ITU definition, these standards do not interoperate. This means that interoperability is no longer just an issue of resolving conflicting interpretations of a single standard; now it is also an issue of overcoming fundamental technological differences among several ITU standards.

Until these obstacles are overcome, conference set-up will continue to be an operational burden that consumes excessive time and resources, particularly for organizations with in-house multimedia facilities. Moreover, these obstacles will continue to pose an upper limit on the widespread applicability of multimedia communications, prohibiting its expansion into a mass market.

The intelligent MCU Fortunately, vendors are working diligently to deliver an interoperability solution that will enable users to call anyone, at any time, over any medium. One viable solution is an intelligent MCU, which has several key capabilities:

Transcoding Gateway. A transcoding gateway is essentially a language interpreter that enables dissimilar endpoints to communicate seamlessly with each other. It performs two distinct functions: transcoding, which is the ability to translate across endpoints' audio, video and bandwidth capabilities, and the gateway function, which is the ability to translate across network technologies (Figure 2).

With the transcoding gateway, human expertise is no longer required to set common parameters for all endpoints in a conference or to resolve incompatibilities arising from different standards implementations. Instead, the intelligent MCU automatically identifies endpoint languages or capabilities, and any necessary translations are made "on the fly" (Figure 3).

With the capability to deliver interoperability for all types of calls, the intelligent MCU will naturally evolve into a fundamental element of multimedia networking. For point-to-point calls-for example, a call between an H.320 ISDN endpoint and an H.323 LAN endpoint-the MCU will serve as a source for translation services and, for larger calls, also will provide multipoint capabilities. No longer just a device for controlling multipoint conferences, the MCU will play a crucial role in creating end-to-end connectivity for a multimedia mass market.

High-throughput bus architecture. The need for high throughput is escalating rapidly as more users try to incorporate more information into their calls. "Continuous presence" enables conference participants to view multiple sites simultaneously, much like the classic TV show Hollywood Squares.

Many of the earlier MCUs cannot handle such large amounts of information because they are designed with low-speed buses, which limits the number of users and features that can be supported at any given time. This means that users often have to forgo continuous presence or other features-or reschedule their conferences if the system's resources are already engaged.

Scalability. To meet the needs of an emerging mass market, the intelligent MCU is designed with a scalable multimedia switch architecture that allows the MCU to grow seamlessly as usage increases. Organizations can start small with their multimedia network and gradually scale up port capacity. This represents a quantum leap over the traditional expansion method of cascading, which consumes ports, requires operational resources, and reduces audio and video quality while increasing delays.

Scalability also enables an organization to incrementally add ports, engineering capacity to deliver the grade of service necessary to support virtually any call volume. By ensuring that a port will always be ready for operation whenever someone wants to make a call, this, in turn, makes it possible to fulfill a fundamental mass market requirement: on-demand conferencing.

Reliability. Previous MCUs were not built to perform in a high- volume environment and, consequently, they are easily overloaded when traffic demands increase. The average downtime for these older architectures is 3%.

Intelligent MCUs are built with a telco-grade design that can endure rigorous conferencing environments. This design includes software-based functionality and the ability to receive power from -48 VDC power sources. In the unlikely event of component failure, a fully redundant architecture ensures that resources are automatically reallocated so that conference participants need never know a failure occurred.

Easy maintenance. With previous MCUs, maintenance often has been a long and complex process requiring system shutdown. The intelligent MCU offers four main features that minimize downtime and the need for human technical expertise:

On-line diagnostics continuously check for signs of failure.

Simple network management protocol interfaces for management systems enable the quick isolation and resolution of problems.

Hot swapping allows replacement of failed modules in the front panel while the system is operating.

Automatic self-configuring modules eliminate the need for manual logging of module capabilities.

Capitalizing on the multimedia age The intelligent MCU solves many of today's multimedia problems, giving carriers an enormous opportunity to position themselves at the forefront of the multimedia communications industry.

To capitalize on this opportunity, carriers will need to incorporate the intelligent MCU into their existing central office facilities. This can easily be accomplished using primary rate ISDN interfaces to connect the intelligent MCU to the carrier's switch and, from there, to the network. Carriers can start out by allocating a single shelf for the intelligent MCU and then add more shelves as the demand for multimedia services increases.

To operate the multimedia service, an appropriate number of attendant workstations should be integrated into the carrier's operations center.

These workstations, usually in the form of standard PCs, can connect to the intelligent MCU via the carrier's existing communication network-typically LAN, intranet or RS-232 connections. From the workstation, attendants can reserve, set up and control conferences while overseeing that all system and network components are functioning properly.

In addition, an intelligent MCU can easily be integrated into the carrier's administration infrastructure-including billing, network management and reservation systems-using an application interface that is often available with this type of equipment.

The return on this investment is a competitive multipoint multimedia gateway service that supports a mass customer base. As more "intelligent" multimedia products become available, these types of multimedia services will become more efficient and attractive, and the multimedia age will be able to achieve its full potential.

Amir Shaked is President and Alberto Eder is Marketing Director at Accord Inc., Petach-Tikva, Israel.