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Conferencing and PSTN Use for Audio

Conferencing technology--such as Cisco WebEx and Microsoft Live Meeting--has two approaches to the audio element. You can route it over the data network, or you can route it over the conventional telephone system ("PSTN" or "Public Switched Telephone Network").

In principle, it's much better to treat the audio as just another data type for the conference and route it over a data network. This makes things much easier for users, because you can have tight integration with the conferencing application. No remembering and entering phone numbers, for example. And usually cheaper.

Internally, companies often run the audio part of conferencing over their in-house data network, because their internal network is fast enough and delivers data in a timely way. However, where participants must connect over public data networks, notably the public Internet, it's common to fall back on conventional telephony, because voice transmission over public data network connections often is not quite good enough for the audio part of a conferencing session (even though most of us have experienced pretty good voice quality at times via Skype).

There are two reasons for this audio-over-Internet shortfall:

• Voice over IP technologies like Skype convey voices much less well when several people are chiming in and even talking over one another--as quite often happens in a conferencing session -- than they do for a one-to-one conversation
• Conferencing behavior is very sensitive to slight delays in delivering the voice signal voice, known as "latency". In the public Internet, there's lots of latency, long and variable, as individual packets of data are delivered via widely varying routes through the network. For a discussion via electronic conferencing, that means all those subtle unwritten rules--about when and how it's OK, or not OK, to chip in and interrupt--get really disrupted. Users find that very unsettling

When will the public Internet be good enough so that it's the default for the audio element of conferencing? Our current guess is around 2014 in most rich countries. In other places, probably quite a bit longer than that. Could be 2040 in some places.

However, that only applies to users who depend on the public Internet, with its best efforts/no promises level of Quality of Service (QoS). More and more businesses are buying Wide Area Ethernet services from telephone companies. Those are IP networks, like the public Internet, but unlike the public Internet they use quality-enhancing techniques like MPLS that reduce latency, lost packets and other QoS problems. Users of such services will likely be able to realize the full benefits of routing both the voice and data parts of a conferencing session together over a data network, long before it becomes the usual method for users who rely entirely on the public Internet. ... David Ferris, with thanks to Michael Tyler for his helpful input

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Mobiles Will Be The Locus of Conferencing Innovation

Today, PC-based conferencing vendors such as Cisco, IBM/Lotus, and Microsoft tend to focus on PC-centric innovation. Eg., support for multi-person video cameras, integration with PBXs, integration with desktop applications.

However, I think the biggest innovations, starting perhaps in 2012, will be found among mobile phones. These will have sufficient bandwidth and computing power to compete with desktops. However:

• Their user interfaces are severely constrained
• They are always with the user
• They have, or will have, location awareness
• They will have plenty of other very innovative aspects

Thus the exciting conferencing developments will, several years hence, turn around mobile phones.

The phones will remain small so that they can easily fit in a pocket. Obviously they'll continue to get thinner. Innovation--in ways we don't imagine--will help us get by with small screens. Presumably, videocameras will often be built in. ... David Ferris

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Have news you want to share with us or product or interest area that you would like us to cover? Send press releases to releases@ferris.com.

Copyright © Ferris Research 2009.