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H.324, Far, Gone, and
Out
by Kyle Nisenson
Is H.324 dead? (For those
of you who are ITU challenged, H.324 is the standard for video over
Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS).) From where I sit it is. About a
year ago there was industry buzz that maybe, just maybe, video over
telephone lines could find a home in the business conferencing
world. There were a number of endpoint manufacturers pitching to
organizations on how now they could conference from the road, or the
home office. Video from your hotel room with product X. A few
service providers got in the game as well, providing gateway
services into H.320 conferences. Problem was, it was not an elegant
solution. No bridge manufacturer produced an H.324 MCU. Instead, to
link up these folks, a codec conversion took place. Users dial an
H.324 codec that has hard wired to feed video directly into an H.320
codec, which subsequently was dialed into an MCU. A few years back,
before everyone ran standards, service providers would connect
proprietary codecs (SG3, CTX, etc.) to H.320 codecs so users without
standards systems could participate in H.320 meetings.
Unfortunately, all of these extra connections often led to a higher
failure rate. Whether it was the a raised failure rate, a drop in
video quality, or folks just not wanting to be seen in their hotel
room, the H.324 service never got off the ground.
Now, many of the major
H.324 vendors are backing off the POTS video market. 3COM has
dropped their H.324 product to focus their efforts on H.323, video
over IP. The market leader, 8X8, still sells the set-top POTS video
units, but a quick peek at their site shows that their key business
focus is also voice and video over IP. 8X8 set-top pitch seems to be
focused now on the home user. Even Intel, who advertised two years
ago (remember the commercials with George from Sienfeld?), has
pretty much given up on pushing the videophone, free H.324 sold with
multimedia PCs. Such is the reality of the business market. If your
road warrior wants to connect from his hotel room, use the dial-up
modem in the PC to connect back to the LAN, and dial out through a
gateway.
The promise of H.323 as the
future of inexpensive video connectivity is clearly the smoking gun
for H.324. Why settle for the limited bandwidth that H.324 offers,
with no hope of improved video quality? There is only so much
compression 56 Kbps can handle. With technologies such as DSL and
cable modems potentially growing IP bandwidth to the home or remote
office exponentially, it just seems like a dead end to invest in
POTS technology. If you are currently using H.324 for business
applications, I would love to hear how it is going! Please drop me a
line at kyle@frontiervtc.com.
On a separate note, thanks
to Elliot Gold for the write-up on Frontier Videoconferencing in his
May 3rd issue of TeleSpan. Please, check it out, and keep tuned into
this column for more detail on some of the statistics he alluded to
in his article. More information to come!
About
Kyle Nisenson
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