Video Conferencing and its History

The current globalization trends have made today’s business, government, educational, and medical organizations of all sizes need to the ability to communicate over different countries or even continents. One the ways in which these organizations communicate is by use of video conferencing technology. This means they need an intelligent network infrastructure and communications tools that support collaboration in real time, from anywhere in the world.

Videoconferencing solutions effectively eliminate the barriers of time, distance, and resources, permitting people around the world to function as if they were in the same room. Companies can integrate telecommuters, arrive at decisions faster. Educational institutions can interactively disseminate knowledge anywhere, creating a true “campus without walls” or provide students with the opportunity to learn by participating in a 2-way communication platform. Furthermore, teachers and lecturers from all over the world can be brought to classes in remote or otherwise isolated places. Students from diverse communities and backgrounds can come together to learn about one another. Doctors can consult specialists from any part of the world to provide the best care for their patients at a reasonable cost.

Organizations that “humanize” their communications in this way can reduce administrative costs and increase productivity, profitability, and competitiveness as never before. Kenyan companies have not been left behind in taking up video conferencing to reduce there operation costs. Recent upsurge in high bandwidth provision by service provider has been fuelling the companies’ ambition for a collaborative, interactive, cost effective and obviously fascinating technology like video conferencing. During the recent African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) conference in at the Kenyatta International Conferencing Center (KICC) in Nairobi, the US President Barrack Obama addressed the delegates via video conferencing. Just to understand this technology, let’s look at its history.

This technology, video conferencing, has undergone a long revolution to what it’s become today. The dream of transmitting audio and video over the telephony network came to reality when digital telephony was introduced in the 1980’s. Integrated Services Data Subscriber (ISDN) lines offer data transmission over the normal telephony network and can carry voice and video, a standard known as H.320. ISDN is universally available in most places where telephony services are available and provides dedicated links for video and others for data. These are the major advantages of ISDN considering; an organization does not require to set up a Wide Area Network and provide quality of service (QoS) by provisioning bandwidth for different classes of traffic. However, ISDN has its limitations; its does not support endpoint monitoring features, doesn’t support network monitoring systems, bandwidth cannot be shared with other endpoints- additional endpoints will require additional ISDN lines and lack of redundancy.

In the 1990s, Internet Protocol (IP) based video conferencing was introduced to address the limitations of video conferencing on ISDN. Efficient video compression technologies such H.323, SIP e.t.c, were developed to permit desktop or personal computer (PC)-based video conferencing. Video conferencing was now possible on a Web browser (Web conferencing) leading to new player in the market that could offer the service; Meeting, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, SightSpeed and Skype. Web conferencing offered low quality video and was suitable for home users rather than corporate organizations, governments and research institutes.

Converged IP solutions came along in the late 1990s and early 2000 to address the needs of the corporate market. Voice, video, data and fax traffic were converged and would all be transmitted on a digital link. The convergence revolution was accompanied by sophisticated applications and devices, which demanded huge bandwidth quantities. Applications like Cisco Webex can do web conferencing, teleconferencing, chat, file sharing and indicate presence of users. New networking technologies were developed to carry the required bandwidth. Plesiochronous Digital Hierarchy (PDH) networking technology was upgraded to Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) which could transmit up to 565 Megabits per second. SDH transmission is mostly done on optical fiber connections (OFC).

Today, video conferencing is universally available on the web or from service providers. Video conferencing solutions can be high-end or low-end. For corporate, high-end solutions like Cisco Unified Communications are implemented. With bandwidths of 4 Megabits per second and more, telepresence systems are implemented, in which case the experience is more immersive and close to reality. For small home users, low-end solutions such D-Link DVC-1000 i2eye VideoPhone systems can be implemented. Simply connect a standard telephone and a television to the DVC-1000, plug in a standard Ethernet network cable connected to your broadband Internet connection and you are ready to conduct real-time videoconferencing.