New Paper “Video Architectures: Disruption Ahead"

Recent shifts in video network architectures promise to impact the videoconferencing world in a powerful way. While IP remains the core transport medium and H.264 remains the video algorithm of choice, interest in a switched infrastructure is coming back, but with several new twists.
Andrew Davis and I published a new paper (Wainhouse Research Note) on the impact of new video architectures on the market place. We compared traditional transcoding with layer switching and stream switching technologies.
The paper is available to WR subscribers at http://wainhouse.com/index.php

Ubiquitous Visual Communications at PTC 2012

The 34th PTC Conference (tagline "Harnessing Disruption: Global, Mobile, Social, Local") gathered about 1400 attendees from the service provider community. As expected, about half of the participants were from the USA while the other half was split among Japan, Canada, China, Australia, Singapore, etc. Over the years, I have developed deep expertise in the North American and European markets (including Eastern Europe and the Russian Federation) but travelling throughout the Asia-Pacific region has always been challenging due to its size and population distribution. PTC is therefore a great opportunity to reach service providers from the Asia-Pacific region without actually travelling to their respective countries, and the conference helps me to get global perspective on the communications market. I enjoy organizing breakout sessions at PTC and inviting high-caliber speakers to discuss hot industry topics. While my PTC 2011 session was dedicated to Unified Communications Services, this year's topic was (Video) Interoperability, Interconnection, and Sky-Rocketing Global Utility.

Telepresence Systems are not only becoming more naturally realistic, they are also becoming more inter-operable with both telepresence solutions from disparate manufacturers and other visual collaboration solutions. At the same time telepresence and video networks (enterprise and carrier overlay / converged WAN) with QoS, low-latency, and high speeds are connecting at telepresence and video exchanges which are handling IP address conflicts, security, and disparate QoS tags allowing organizations to connect with partners, vendors, and customers. This growing interoperability and inter-connection along with directories, publicly available telepresence, and improved collaborative tools is sending utility, what you can do and who you can reach, sky-rocketing! The session was prominently featured on the PTC web site and now includes the slides from the three presentations.

The session included three speakers: Damian McCabe, David Gilbert, and me. Damian McCabe is Business Head and General Manager at Bharti airtel US Global Data Business. In this role, he oversees the US business for Bharti airtel including the executive management of Wholesale, Channel, Enterprise, supplier and partner accounts. Damien talked about airtel's involvement in the Open Visual Communication Consortium (OVCC), and focused on business model and roadmap. He highlighted the importance of carrier interconnects that are being implemented right now.

The OVCC interconnects are the first time large service providers (carriers) connect their IP networks to exchange real-time traffic (video calls). It took me some time to understand the revolutionary nature of the carrier interconnects for video, since I am used to IP interconnectivity across enterprises – admittedly through firewalls, session border controllers, etc. In carrier networks, however, TDM interconnects are still used for exchanging voice calls across networks, and IP interconnects are very new.

Damian's presentation generated questions from other service providers that consider joining OVCC or are in the process of joining OVCC.

Dave Gilbert is CEO and Founder of SimpleSignal. His vision to create a disruptive communications service provider attracted a team of telecom industry veterans to develop and engineer one of the first Cloud Communications platforms designed from the ground up specifically for SMB's. Dave's presentation "Bringing Telepresence to Any Mobile Device" focused on service providers' evolution from voice to video services ("Video is the new voice"), and the increasing role of mobile devices in voice and visual communications. Dave had a live demo of high-quality video call between a soft client on an iPad tablet connected over the 3G network to an HD video system at SimpleSignal's office. Although the wireless network at PTC was overloaded, the demonstration worked very well, and the audio-video quality was excellent.

My presentation was about market trends, interoperability, and standardization. In terms of market trends, I focused on the increased use of video by information workers, increasing number of video clients, and the increased share of multi-codec systems. The increasing demand for hosted and managed services (poised to become $6.2B market in 2014, based on Wainhouse Research) creates a lot of new opportunities for service providers.

In the interoperability area, the biggest advances in 2011 were around connecting multi-codec systems, and I covered interoperability scenarios including SIP, H.323, and TIP protocols, point-to-point and multipoint configurations. I highlighted the challenges around connecting systems with different number of screens, different screen aspect ratios, and different audio capabilities (that is, different number of mono or stereo channels). I concluded my part with an update from the standardization bodies (ITU-T, IETF) and interoperability organizations (IMTC, UCIF, OVCC).

In summation, PTC 2012 was a great opportunity to meet service providers from North America and Asia-Pacific. The sessions were generous both in terms of length and in terms of breaks between sessions; that allowed for discussions to continue after the official part was completed. The idea of offering ubiquitous visual communication, that is, making video as simple and reliable as a voice call, is catching on, and increasing number of service providers have joined or are about to join OVCC to work together towards "Interoperability, Interconnection, and Sky-Rocketing Global Utility".

Cluster of Conferences around ITEXPO

Summary

ITEXPO East 2012 in Miami last week was a great opportunity to meet with customers, distributors, and vendors, get the latest updates from the industry, and communicate the latest and greatest from Polycom.
The conference part had four tracks: Communication and Collaboration (mostly discussions around UC), Customer Engagements (mostly Contact Centers and Clouds), IT2.0 (Clouds everywhere), and Next-generation Service Providers (Clouds again). So in reality ITEXPO was about UC and Clouds.

TMC CEO Rich Tehrani keeps critical mass through organizing a dozen of mini-conferences in parallel to the main ITEXPO event, in effect, creating a cluster of conferences. In addition to the more established 4GWE conference and Ingate (SIP Trunking and UC) Summit, the conference cluster now includes Cloud Communications Expo, SUITS, and several other events.

Key analysts in the industry attend ITEXPO to moderate sessions, present, meet with vendors, and get updates on their solutions.

Finally, there are lively exhibits with a lot of new companies showing products and services. Traditional enterprise communication vendors (Avaya, Cisco, Siemens …) have withdrawn from the exhibits in recent years; distributors, service providers, and smaller vendors have taken over.

ITEXPO

I attended several ITEXPO sessions. The most interesting one was "Building the UC Business Case" (Feb 1, 11am) where Irwin Lazar from Nemertes shared results from a recent survey of IT managers about UC deployments. The business case for UC remains elusive. Just 40% of the companies require business case and only 10% measure UC success through cost savings and cost avoidance while the majority relies on user satisfaction (37%), improved collaboration (21%), and feature adoption (19%). When it comes to measuring UC, soft metrics rule the day. Mobility is a key planning concern with 81% of respondents planning to support mobile devices. Finally, Microsoft Lync is making inroads in the enterprise with 19% of respondents deploying it and 37% evaluating it.

My ITEXPO session "Beyond travel avoidance – the real value of HD videoconferencing and collaboration" (Feb 2, 2pm) focused on increasing meeting effectiveness through advanced collaboration capabilities that enhance decision making and improve productivity. The moderator Mark Ricca from IntelliCom Analytics invited three speakers: Scott Morrison, BD Director at Magor Communications, Ron Burns, CEO of ProtonMedia, and me.

My talk focused on the two approaches to improving collaboration and team work with video. The first approach is to improve collaboration capabilities in video solutions - HD content sharing, including to tablets and other mobile devices, white boarding (Polycom UC Board is a good example), studio experience (like in EagleEye Director), and content capturing and management. The second way is to integrate visual communication with collaboration solutions from partners. Good examples are Polycom's integration with Microsoft Lync (for which it was named the 2011 Microsoft UC Innovation Partner of the Year), with IBM SameTime and IBM Connections social business platforms (as announced at LotusSphere in January), and with Jive social media for enterprise.

4GWE Conference 

The 4GWE conference was about building broadband wireless networks with focus on the LTE wireless interface and backhaul technologies. Since I knew a lot about the wireless interface (LTE), I enjoyed the presentation on backhaul technologies by Amir Mekleff, President and CEO, BridgeWay Communications (Feb 1, 1pm).

Due to the trend towards more tablets (tablets outselling laptops) and more smartphones, backhaul bandwidth is and will continue to be bottleneck. Users expect wire-line performance, and are usually disappointed. The sweet spot for LTE networks is microcells with 1-3 miles radius that can deliver up to 100Mbps over the wireless interface or pico cell with 0.1-0.5 miles radius that can deliver up to 300Mbps.

Fiber, cable, and copper are used for backhaul but also increasingly microwave and millimeter wave technologies. While microwaves (6-38GHz spectrum) are good for 4G traffic backhaul over long distances (6GHz can go up to 50 miles, 38GHz can go up to 5 miles), millimeter waves (60-90GHz) are good for 4G traffic backhaul over short distances in densely populated areas. Microwave links have very high penetration in Europe where 60-70% of backhaul via microwave - mostly because old cities are difficult to dig for fiber.

Cloud Communications Summit

I also presented in a session "Can UC in the Cloud?" (Feb 3, 9am) that focused on Unified Communications as a Service. This segment is poised to become nearly a $6 billion dollar market within the next few years. Traditional on-premises solutions will continue to be replaced by more modular and elastic services that can be provisioned, delivered, and monitored through multi-tenant infrastructures, to any user, and location, any device and at any time.

Moderator Thomas Howe, Principal at Embrase, invited three speakers: Davide Petramala, VP Marketing and Sales at Esna Technologies, Chad Krantz, Executive Director Channel Sales at Broadvox, and me. The discussion was mostly about real-time cloud communications, issues with quality of service and what each of participating companies was doing the cloud computing area.

Ingate Summit

Ingate manufactures session border controllers. Since SIP trunking was the most important application for Ingate initially, they started the Ingate SIP Trunking Summit several years ago and always run it in parallel to ITEXPO. They later added UC topics to the Summit and now have 2-2.5 days of educational content. There seems to be demand for education and training because the Summit is very well attended.

I had the chance to present about OVCC at the previous Summit (Austin, September 2011). The hot topic this time was the Ingate Internet+ initiative. The idea goes back to the original SIP architecture (reminds me of discussions 10-12 years ago) that is a flat IP network with end-to-end SIP sessions and IP packets flowing freely end-to-end, too. Unfortunately, voice carriers did not embrace the original SIP voice vision, and created VOIP islands that continue to peer via TDM connections. Since carriers have an established mechanism to trade voice minutes, they never moved pass TDM peering, which in turn means lower voice quality due to multiple conversions of voice from IP to TDM and vice versa; it also creates huge problems for fax. Ingate wants to persuade carriers to peer over IP, so that SIP-based voice, video, IM, presence, etc. can freely flow.

I do not think carriers will rush to embrace the Internet+ idea; the impact on their business model is too significant. However, OVCC managed to bring carriers around the table and reach an agreement on IP peering for video. Carriers seem to see video as very different from voice and do not mind having a different architecture for it. In my view, once the OVCC model has been established for video, we can talk about using the OVCC interconnects to expand the definition with other services: presence, IM, etc. Voice will continue to be the most sensitive topic…

Synopsis Under IP/Patents Telecom Sourcing Conference (SUITS)

I came across SUITS by accident in the lunch break. There was no other free table and I sat next to what it turned out to be a subset of the 20+ corporate attorneys attending the SUITS conference. The official goal of the SUITS event is to advance knowledge innovations of telecommunications, and teach technologists about IPR protection, patent pools, etc.

I had a great conversation with William Geary, Jr. VP of Business Development at MPEGLA who was also one of the key speakers are the event. Bill talked about the efforts in the H.264 licensing pool – Polycom is a part of it – to make H.264 Baseline Profile royalty-free. I really think that makes sense since vendors are moving to higher efficiency profiles such as Main and High. Making the Baseline Profile royalty-free would address some of the issues organizations such as W3C have with adoption of H.264 in their work.

LTE and the Future of Mobile Networking

Upperside Conferences invited me to present about the advances in voice and video technology at the Voice over LTE conference last week. Upperside's conferences always focus on a specific technology subject and perfect if you want to learn "everything" about it. This time the talks were all about LTE, which stands for Long Term Evolution (LTE), and is a key new technology that revolutionizes mobile networks.

LTE versus VoLTE

LTE is a radio access technology that was developed in 3GPP to enhance performance and efficiency in mobile networks, more specifically, increase bit rates (up to 150 Mbps), improve cell spectrum efficiency, and reduce air interface latency. Since LTE itself is a pure IP packet service, transporting voice, SMS, and other media like video and IM has to be specified separately.

Voice over LTE is defined as an end-to-end service that includes not only the efficient LTE radio but also the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) core, the Evolved Packet Core (EPC), and LTE capable devices (dongles, tablets, and smart phones). The key difference between LTE and VoLTE is therefore that LTE is the wireless interface while VoLTE is a complete solution for transporting voice and SMS over the new network.

The problem is that the solution – although fairly new – already needs extension with IM, video, and other functions, and the "voice" in VoLTE is very limiting. So the mobile networking community created something called Real-time Communication Services extension (RCS-e), that extends the voice and SMS services with, for example, IM/chat, file transfer, image and video share. It is roughly the equivalent of what we call Unified Communications in the enterprise communication space. Similar to UC, RCS-e is based on service/capability discovery and uses the SIP protocol. The role of SIP in enterprise UC is described here.

As with any other technology, getting the acronyms right is half of the work, so here are the important ones.

IMS is an architectural framework for delivering multimedia services. The idea is decouple the application from the access method, so that the same functionality can be accesses over wireless (3G, 4G) and fixed networks. This idea is not new: web applications, for example, do not care about the underlying network as long as it carries HTTP; this is probably why they are dubbed Over The Top (OTT) applications in mobile networking lingo. IMS is a revolution in mobile networks where traditionally separate functions were implemented for each type of network. By developing applications only once in the IMS core mobile SPs can shortens time-to-market and compete more successfully with OTT applications. IMS is also designed to provide QOS for applications through the different access networks, and this is a major differentiator for mobile SPs.

EPC is basically an IP router with mobility intelligence that includes handover (switching the connection when the mobile device moves from one radio cell to another), roaming (provides access when users leave their own SP network and enter the network of another SP), etc.

From Circuit Switched Voice to VoLTE

The LTE radio technology is different from 3G and building LTE networks requires substantial capital investment, as pioneers Verizon and MetroPCS in the USA and Vodafone in Europe know very well. As a result, LTE networks will coexist with 2G and 3G networks for long time, and it is critical to find a way to switch calls seamlessly from LTE to non-LTE networks when the user leaves LTE coverage. There are two ways to do that - Single Radio Voice Call Continuity (SRVCC) and Circuit Switched Fall Back (CSFB) – the former using single radio and being less expensive, the latter using dual-radio and costing more.

QOS

In terms of bandwidth, LTE can theoretically provide up to 150Mbps shared in a radio cell. LTE bandwidth is symmetric, that is, upstream bitrate can be equal to downstream bitrate; this makes LTE best choice for symmetric services such as online gaming and real-time voice and video. If there are 200 users in the radio cell, each user can get 0.75Mbps which is enough for high-quality H.264 video.

A bigger QOS problem in LTE networks is network congestion that leads to rapidly increasing delay (and packet loss) with very little advance notice. In video conferencing, the receiving endpoint sends congestion notification to the sender (SIP does that via RTCP while H.323 uses the H.245 Flow Control message), and the sender down-speeds, that is, reduce either resolution or frame rate. Mobile networking vendors are researching ways to detect congestion on a radio cell level; that would require the radio node to send congestion notifications. Since the radio node sees all traffic from all users in the radio cell, it can give an advance warning. It will be important for mobile UC application with video capabilities to listen for such notifications and down-speed – even if their own session is performing well.

Packet loss in LTE networks usually becomes a problem when the user is at the periphery of the cell where the radio signal is weak. When the signal strength is good and the user does not move, frame error rate can be as low as 0.2% which results in negligible packet loss.

To provide Quality of Service to applications, VoLTE defines QOS Class Identifiers (QCI); each of them is appropriate for certain type of traffic. For example, QCI1 bearer is optimized for VoIP/VoLTE. Tests show transmission latency of 140-160ms, which has to be added to the RTP delay and voice/video codec delay. The resulting end-to-end latency can therefore be higher than 200ms, and more work has to be done to reduce the latency below the 200ms limit critical for interactivity on voice and video calls.

Another important QCI for real time communication is QCI5 that is used for signaling (call setup/tear down). Currently, the end-to-end call setup time in 2G/3G networks is about 6 sec, and VoLTE performs better: call setup times measured over the QCI5 bearer are about 2-3 seconds, even when the LTE device is in battery saving mode.

The QOS issues in mobile networks listed above are not very different from the QOS issues in fixed IP networks a decade ago. Video conferencing technology has matured over longer period of time and has therefore already implemented mechanisms for compensating bandwidth reduction (for example, down-speeding implemented in Polycom HDX video endpoints), packet loss (for example, Polycom Lost Packet Recovery), lip sync, etc.

LTE as a Fixed Network Replacement

I often hear that LTE is not a substitute for fixed access networks such as VDSL and FTTH, and my reaction is always "Why not?" As I learned at the VoLTE conference, there is a business case for using LTE instead of DSL to provide high-speed network access. For example, DSL providers in Germany pay a fee of 10 Euros for using the last mile of copper, and Internet SP are very eager to get rid of this cost. Since LTE can provide bandwidths comparable to fixed lines, modem vendors are adding LTE to the portfolio of access technologies. A great example is the FRITZ!Box, the most popular home gateway in Germany, that combines a modem (DSL, cable, and since October - LTE), a router, a firewall, a Wi-Fi access point and a DECT base station. It is a perfect solution for people like me who hate cables lying in the living room or office. Reported throughput over LTE is up to 100Mbps downstream and 50Mbps upstream which makes it Category 3 LTE device.

I have already heard that some service providers in the USA are experimenting with LTE as a fixed line replacement for services to businesses. Considering the cost and time necessary to setup a fixed line (like T1 or T3) to the customer premises, using LTE is a very attractive alternative for service providers. Now imagine that the business has an IP-PBX that uses SIP trunking to connect to a service provider. Bundling LTE and SIP trunking services is suddenly not a far-fetched idea.

All in all, I think LTE will impact both residential high-speed access and business services provided by service providers. The only "if" is Quality of Service. According to the discussion at VoLTE QOS mechanisms in LTE perform well in test environments and initial field deployments but will they do a good job once the LTE network is flooded with LTE capable devices that compete for resources?

Conclusion

The great thing about LTE is that it makes the mobile networks like any other IP network. Enterprise IP applications that used to require complex gateways to interface to mobile networks will now be able to run on the mobile network without much customization. The low hanging fruit is running Unified Communication soft clients like Polycom Real Presence Mobile on media tablets and leveraging the LTE network to connect back to the enterprise network. Going IP end-to-end will help reduce complexity but also cut latency to the absolute minimum. More work will be required in the area of QOS, especially in the congestion detection and notification on a radio cell level.

Mobile Service Providers will continue to develop IMS based application, also leveraging RCS-e, and it will be interesting to track the adoption of IMS applications and other, so called OTT, applications. While most of the Video Networker followers are from enterprise background, and are therefore familiar with the efforts in the enterprise UC environment, we should not ignore the efforts in the mobile networking space to solve the fundamental UC problem.

EduTech and the New Polycom Office in Moscow

The EduTech conference in Moscow was a gathering of representatives from schools, universities, and corporate training organizations in the Russian Federation to discuss new technologies and methods for teaching and training remotely. Understandably, this topic is very hot in a country that stretches over 9 time zones (11 before the reform in 2010) and that requires a lot of communication between Moscow and the regions.

I had the pleasure to present on my favorite topic "Music Performance and Instruction over High-Speed Networks" (in Russian "Видео для музыкального обучения и трансляции концертов"). The presentation was part of a session dedicated to video technology for education, and resulted in many questions and discussions during and after the session. Did I mention that I enjoy presenting in Russian?

While in Moscow, I also got an early peek of the new Polycom office and Executive Briefing Center that officially opened on October 4. The office is located at the Paveletskaya Square which makes it easily accessible from the Domodedovo International Airport (DME) – a non-stop train connects the two - and through the Moscow subway system. The Business Center "Paveletskaya Plaza" is a beautiful 26-story tower visible from afar, and has a modern lobby with well-organized security.

Polycom has the entire 23^rd floor of the building which results in spectacular views in all directions.

The new office is not only home for the Polycom employees in Moscow but also has the latest Polycom technology, including RPX 400 and OTX 300 immersive telepresence systems, all connected via high-bandwidth networks to other Polycom offices. I could not resist the temptation and placed a couple of telepresence calls across the Atlantic. The picture was crystal-clear and stats showed 6Mbps network bandwidth with no packet loss.

Followers of Video Networker in the Russian Federation, I would highly recommend making an appointment (otherwise security will not let you in) and visiting the new Polycom office in Moscow.