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I worked in Videoconferencing in the 90's and the advent of better CPU and processing power come the turn of the century with netmeeting, many in the industry t
by Zenst 9y ago
I worked in Videoconferencing in the 90's and the advent of better CPU and processing power come the turn of the century with netmeeting, many in the industry thought the days of dedicated hardware and expensive MCU (Multipoint control units) was soon to be usurped. Nearly 20 years on and yet to see that killer video conferencing feature.
Of note was also privy to early testing of Three (UK 3G mobile network) tests for video and whilst managed to stream the Matrix in the early days as a test, that never took of either and that was more due to the costs of data connections, an issue very much moot these days (least in the UK).
One area that often lets down videoconferencing at the consumer level are the camera's and the environment the user uses them in and gets down to lighting. But again, no killer, easy to use consumer solution has come and taken the market by storm.
Sure many point to point video solutions on offer and used but no universal standard multipoint as easy as sending an email to multiple people is jumping out.
With that, I wish Facebook good luck and they do have the user base to drive this, but I'm not sure it is a feature as high in demand for consumer users as many wish or feel it is.
I can only put this down again to the environments such consumer systems (your mobile say) are used in and whilst the processing power is there to alleviate much of this, that has still to come to fruition as a user friendly reliable experience.
- stevenwoo 9y agoWow, I haven't run into refugee from that videoconferencing era in a while, I worked at VTel in the 90's in Austin.
- Zenst 9y agoI worked for a company called TopTel, managed the VC networks for ICL, DOH and few others, dealt with many Telco's and bridge companies who's names escape me at the time. international VC and dialing the extra 0 for ISDN lines to make sure they didn't route over satellite and then the fun of switched ISDN (North American ISDN standard with it's bit stealing 56k lines over the dedicated D channel 64k lines). Fun times. One aspect of VC was you could tell if a network link (leased lines) was not upto scratch as you would see bit error, unlike network data, which would happily gloss over such odd bit errors. Other fun and games was ISDN circuits being stolen due to engineers repatching lines of little used circuits and then when the ISDN would lock up and that would often be that the bit error count hit a limit. You would call up, get the telco to test the line/circuit and low and behold it would be working again, this was due to the test resetting the error count. Had a neat way of testing lines using my 2G mobile on the Orange network, in that if I called an ISDN line the way it terminated the call would indicate if it was up or was errored, or busy. But my funniest story would be spending 30 minutes trying to resolve an issue with a PicturTel setup with some French chap and why the audio from his end was not working, turned out he was sat upon the microphone.
- stevenwoo 9y agoMy company and I could have used your knowledge! Got sent to Europe to debug some problems where we had an ISDN card from a third party installed in our systems and got to visit UK, Germany, Belgium, and France to look at different issues.
- microcolonel 9y agoI have a SIP network among some friends of mine, and it is awesome. The quality and latency are superb, and the resource usage is acceptable. The problem is peering with all of the lazy third-party networks. It seems something always goes wrong when I try to SIP some random Cisco system outside of my infrastructure. The client applications and libraries could also use some TLC. I have a feeling that WebRTC portals are going to be the main way SIP calls are made as time goes forward, so somebody has to do it, I'd be glad to devote my life to it if I could make a salary and do it as open source. I think SIP could be great, if some focus were put on interoperability and service providers. We really need something you could rightly call the GMail of SIP to show the world that open standard n-to-n video conferencing can be done well.