Carriers hold the missing link to video adoption

Multi-screen video conferencing between different vendor platforms and provider networks will require carriers to link their exchanges, said Tim Rubert, senior vice president of managed services at BT Conferencing. 

"You'll be seeing announcements from the carriers hooking exhange to exchange" in the next few months, Rubert said while speaking at the Cisco Partner Summit in San Francisco.

Single-screen video-conferencing between vendors has been possible for some time after they adopted standards such as SIP (session initiation protocol) and H.264. 

However, connecting two multi-screen video calls originating from different manufacturer's platforms fell outside the capability of the standards. This restricted video conferencing to inter-company calls has hampered a broader take-up of the technology.

BT Conferencing, a subsidiary of telco BT, has a global video-conferencing exchange for 500 customers running on Tandberg and Cisco platforms. Rubert said that once carriers started linking exchanges it would break down the "islands of isolation" created by incompatible multi-screen formats.

The International Multimedia Telecommunications Consortium was reviewing a Cisco protocol which allows switching between multi-screen formats by making traffic appear as a single, coherent stream. 

While video-conferencing technology would soon be interoperable among vendors, supporting commercial arrangements were still required, said Richard McLeod, Cisco's senior director for collaboration, worldwide partner organisation.

McLeod compared the situation to the development of mobile phone networks. Carriers had to agree on how to split costs, revenue and traffic before they could allow a call from one mobile network to be received on another.

Cisco confirmed it is developing technologies such as video conferencing to run on virtual machines on its unified computing system (UCS) server platform.

We will take advantage of Cisco's investment in virtualised compute and storage resources, said Charles Stucki, Cisco's vice president and general manager of telepresence technology group. He said the multipoint switch which runs large video meetings was one candidate for virtualisation.