Hungry to replace eroding transport revenues, carriers seek to add value and sell more bandwidth--and videoconferencing is a natural area of expansion.

"Once the economy begins to recover, videoconferencing will see meteoric growth," predicts Jeff Prestel, general manager of BT's Video Conferencing Unit. After watching the videoconferencing market emerge over the past several years and interviewing seven carriers to find out what they are up to, we agree that global videoconferencing is indeed coming into its own. We’ve set out to provide an overview of what videoconferencing services telecommunications carriers offer today--and in a follow-up article we will offer guidance for how to choose the right carrier for your video traffic.

Global Videoconferencing Going Mainstream
The long-awaited mainstream adoption of business videoconferencing is finally happening. Experience quality is improving, systems are increasingly easy to use, and high-end "immersive" solutions are creating buzz if not making major inroads just yet. Several of the carriers we spoke to tell us that consumer exposure to Skype on the low end and HDTV on the high end is a potent force driving business videoconferencing adoption. Corporate IT types as well as ordinary network users are dabbling in the technologies at home, enabling them to see the technologies’ potential in the workplace. Eager to capitalize on this trend, carriers are ramping up to help.

Long the private niche of Polycom and Tandberg, global videoconferencing catapulted into prominence when the 800-pound gorilla Cisco burst onto the scene with its Telepresence solution in 2007. Cisco's entry validated the market for carriers as a group--with Cisco serious about videoconferencing, it was time to take notice.

Increasingly hungry to replace eroding transport revenues, carriers have been stalking opportunities to add value and sell more bandwidth--and videoconferencing is emerging as a natural area of expansion. Not only does videoconferencing require substantial bandwidth, it requires implementation of QoS as well. This is welcome news for carriers because they can charge more for the additional QoS service. Longstanding relationships with Cisco for network gear have smoothed the way for carriers with no previous videoconferencing experience to enter the fray through an already comfortable connection.

Videoconferencing Service Types
Like tourist class, business class, and first class airline tickets, business videoconferencing services come in three basic classes: desktop videoconferencing, room-based videoconferencing, and "immersive" telepresence. Just as in the airline example, experience quality improves the more you pay.

If you've used Skype, you have experienced poor man's desktop videoconferencing. Desktop videoconferencing allows users to see and hear each other on demand using a PC. The video image is usually tiny, grainy, and jumpy, and the audio is unpredictable--but for the price, one can’t complain.

In room-based videoconferencing, conference participants physically convene in specially-appointed rooms containing dedicated videoconferencing gear, and are interconnected via a videoconferencing system that usually runs over a shared IP data network. BT's Jeff Prestel describes room-based videoconferencing services as the "meat and potatoes of the market." Like conventional conference rooms, videoconference rooms must be reserved in advance, but scheduling is more complex because a room must be reserved at each participating location.

Room-based systems support a range of resolutions and configurations. The quality of the experience depends on choosing the right technology for the right enterprise application. Poorly designed solutions and rooms lead to a frustrating experience, while well designed solutions provide excellent results. The difficulty of getting room-based video deployment right led to widespread frustration and low system utilization. The recent introduction of HD quality video and much larger plasma or LCD screens has changed the quality equation, spurring new growth in room-based deployments.

Immersive videoconferencing services enable an experience that is to room-based videoconferencing what analog TV viewing is to an iMax theater experience. Although immersive videoconferencing isn't quite the same as iMax, the idea is similar. The goal of the service is to provide sufficiently powerful audio and visual effects so you feel you are together in the same room with the remote participants. As you can imagine, achieving this experience involves a great deal of sophisticated and expensive equipment connected to a carefully designed network, because the technology demands constant high-quality transport with very low loss and jitter.