IMTC Fall Forum Trip Report
by Kyle Nisenson

I re-learned a valuable lesson this November. I have been in Telecommunications for over 7 years, and video for a full 5 years. I have seen both audio and video come an enormously long way in the last few years, and really thought I was getting a handle on the way things were, and the way things are. Then I decided to attend the IMTC Fall Forum in Keystone Colorado. Nothing like three days of having the world move under your feet.

The International Multimedia Telecommunications Consortium (IMTC for short), is a group of vendors and engineers from the telecommunications community dedicated to taking the ITU standards farther. While the ITU (International Telecommunications Union) defines the standards such as H.320 and H.323, the IMTC ensures that the standards are being implemented successfully, and that they are evolving with the marketplace. The IMTC meets live twice a year, and because the forums are "international", the meetings are all over the world. This one, as fate would have it, landed in my back yard.

Now, this is not the first fall forum I have attended, nor will it be the last, but this one has certainly been the most eye opening. There are always a number of speeches that don't pertain or interest what I am working on. One track focused on operating systems and ended up being the usual debate between Unix and Windows NT. There were several tracks on wireless communications, which while interesting, are a long way from implementation for video. One particularly painful session focussed on the complications of international politics and legalities of worldwide telephony standardization. I will spare you the gory details.

Fortunately though, there were a number of tracks I found very interesting. A debate continues to rage on where voice and video over IP are going. One side firmly believes that H.323 is the way, and speakers addressed the further development and integration of the Media Gateway Control Protocol (MGCP) into the standards (soon to be H.248). A second faction believes that H.323 is just too top heavy to survive, and instead is pushing the development of a separate protocol called SIP, or Simple Internet Protocol. Many believe that it is ridiculous to have teams of engineers developing applications under separate protocols.

Another track dove into DSL deployment. Today there are more that 80 service providers worldwide (and growing) who offer DSL services, and an estimated 500,000+ connections to date. Aggressive predictions anticipate 6.6 Million locations connected through DSL by the year 2004. Broadband lives.

One excellent session addressed studies on IP quality of service. KPN in Europe has performed some limited voice over IP trials and has surveyed their customers on opinions of the technology. They were unabashed with the results. 1/3 of their customers were unsatisfied with the service of the IP voice, with voice quality being the biggest issue raised. The offering KPN made to trial customers was a 50% reduction in cost to standard service. While the offer did trigger some initial interest, all customer who experienced repeated technical problems (echo, clipping, loss of bi-direction) quickly switched back to standard service. The concluding message was that customers will not sacrifice call quality just for price reduction, and without a strong economic case it may be near impossible to convince users of the intelligence of such a switch.

The coup-de'-gras of the week was the final keynote address. Actually, there were three lock-notes. Andrew Davis from Wainhouse Consulting, and Bhawani Shankar from Gartner Group both spoke on the state of the telecommunications market, and their predictions for the upcoming millennium. Commentary ranged from free long distance to the death of the ISP to smart refrigerators, but the keynote that really grabbed me was the final speech, delivered by Frank Barnes from the University of Colorado's Masters Program. While the other two consultants spoke in terms I understood with technologies I had mostly considered, Mr. Barnes went so far over my head I felt like I was back in grade school.

Professor Barnes sees us using organic transportation mediums in the future, taking from what we have learned from neural networks and how the brain functions as a powerful medium for everyday communications. He also sees bit-rate brought down to the atomic level. While I thought what we were doing today with the breakdown of light signals over fiber was amazing, he suggests breaking things down to the molecular level and defining bit functions based on whether single atoms are present in specific locations. After a week of speeches and standards discussion, I departed the conference with quite a lasting impression of the entire event.

The lesson I walked away with was that we are barely starting down the evolutionary path of telecommunications, and there are some amazing things coming down the pipeline. The minds learning in our best educational programs are not learning the same "old stuff", but instead considering, investigating, and implementing some startling new ways of doing things. If we have learned one thing from the last few years, it is that as organizations we must be prepared for continued radical changes in all forms technology, and communications is certainly a big part of that. Buckle up folks, this ride is just getting started.

You can learn more on the IMTC at www.imtc.org.

About Kyle Nisenson

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