No more next years?: IP videoconferencing is here...really

This time, they mean it. Vendors have been talking about bringing Internet protocol-based videoconferencing to the desktop for the better part of the 1990s. But until recently, it was just that-talk.

However, several recent product announcements are pushing the industry toward its own promised vision of widespread, user-friendly products.

Ironically, the intense interest in IP voice may provide the biggest boost yet for a technology that is still in its infancy. H.323, which many vendors are developing to provide IP voice, has its roots in the videoconferencing market where it is used to carry video over IP-based environments, particularly LANs. In fact, further development of the H.323 standard promises to give vendors and carriers the potential of having significantly more end points to serve with videoconferencing applications.

"We're really excited about having that many more endpoints out there," said Matt Fuller, senior product manager of videoconferencing services for Frontier ConferTech, the conferencing division of Frontier Communications.

But before reaching that vision, vendors must gain more experience developing network equipment that can handle those various endpoints. VideoServer, for one, is beginning to integrate H.323 capabilities into its Encounter line of servers. The company's latest release, the Encounter NetServer ADX 1000, is initially being marketed as a voice and data conferencing server with a possible upgrade to video.

The result is a box that can serve multiple types of endpoints, including ISDN, asynchronous transfer mode, IP and PBX phones.

"In effect, it's a POTS phone, but you're sitting on the IP cloud," said Marty Falaro, vice president of marketing and business development for Frontier ConferTech.

Vendors are banking on the development of IP-based videoconferencing not only because it opens up a significantly larger market, but also because it opens up the application development environment.

"Moving to IP opens up a whole new realm because it's accessible to everyone," said Peg Landry, director of product marketing for White Pine software. White Pine, one of the earliest companies in the IP videoconferencing market with its CU See Me client software, is also moving toward the data collaboration market as a way to spark interest in video. "People are starting with data collaboration because it's a known quantity," Landry said. "Audio will be next, and then the third phase is video. That's the unknown phase in terms of bandwidth allocation."

In its latest effort, White Pine is trying to address that unknown with a distributed model that reduces the amount of required network bandwidth (see figure).

The rapid development of H.323 is also giving carriers reason to address the bandwidth issue that has previously held back widescale deployment. Microsoft further seeds the market by shipping its NetMeeting H.323 client with newer versions of Windows, Landry said.

"When you think about what's happening in the applications, the functionality has been limited by the network," added Faloro, who thinks the cable industry may have a good chance at capturing the market through its cable modem deployments. "With broadband, the applications are exploding."

Frontier sees corporate users moving slowly to a desktop videoconferencing environment, if only because information service managers won't want to deal with the unfamiliar. Existing WANs can't cost-effectively handle the bandwidth requirements. However, the company is experimenting with IP-based services in the labs.

"The people who are doing videoconferencing today are doing it in very controlled environments," said Fuller. "In the LAN, a lot of people can handle the bandwidth because they're moving to 100baseT. It's really the WAN that's bringing people down right now."

"It's one that we're continuing to evaluate," added Judd Spencer, director of marketing for Frontier ConferTech. "Right now we're just scratching the surface."