Sizing

The most important aspect to video conferencing is determining what size you need. The sizes can be categorized as personal conferencing, conference room, and boardroom solutions.

Personal conferencing solutions can be as simple as using the free Microsoft NetMeeting product on your laptop/desktop with a $100 video camera from Creative Labs, 3Com, or a host of other companies. Or you can purchase a more industrial-strength camera for over $350 and use it with either NetMeeting or a solution provided by the camera vendor. While not as common as the $100 cameras, there are a large number of vendors that provide these solutions. Because of the lower-quality camera associated with these solutions, I recommend using this solution if you have only one or two people on the local end. These cameras do conform to current standards, so you can also connect to a conference room solution, enabling you to have multiple people on the remote end.

These solutions use whatever networking connections are provided on the computer they're attached to: modem dialup, high-speed home Internet, corporate networking, etc. It is, however, hard to connect to ISDN, which is a common transport in this arena.

The advantage of this class of video conferencing is its portability. It's lightweight, and you can install it on many computers. Groups can share the camera when needed, and the conference can be hosted from anywhere--even a cubicle.

The next step up--a conference room solution--starts at about $10,000 per site and provides some portability, but I can tell you from experience it is not fun. These solutions can be implemented on a portable cart. Our cart just barely fits through a door. Including the TVs, it's about 6 feet high, 4 feet wide, and 3 feet deep. Commonly, you will find that carts for these solutions are about 4 feet high, 2 ½ feet wide, and 2 ½ feet deep.

However, the audio quality for a conference room solution is significantly better. These solutions come with "pods," microphones about the size of a hockey puck that are placed on conference room tables (instead of on top of the video unit). This allows the microphone to be closer to the participants, providing better quality. Expect to have a minimum of two pods for a 14 foot by 20 foot room. Additional pods can be added to cover larger rooms or provide better quality. The video quality is also better, as these solutions come with a wide-angle camera that is optimized to the video conferencing solution. These cameras are able to zoom, and pan up, down, right, and left. We'll discuss the factors that affect quality in the next section.

The final class of video conferencing solutions is for executive boardrooms. There is no portability with this solution; it's typically built right into the room. In the initial consultation, the vendor examines room parameters, acoustic performance, etc. The price of the equipment will be only a portion of the cost. Consultation fees and room alterations will chew up a portion of the budget as well.

The quality is outstanding with this solution. Everything is tailored to your room, so you receive the best audio clarity and high-definition video. Expect to pay at least $50,000 per room for these solutions.

Feature Overview

Video conferencing solutions offer many features and technologies, and the current big four providers support most of them. Those that are not supported are rarely if ever used. Still, it's important to know about all the available features, which are typically tailored to conference and boardroom solutions.

Bandwidth

Before deciding the medium upon which your video conferencing calls will take place, you need to determine on how much bandwidth you will need. A 128Kbps call delivers choppy, grainy motion and poor audio. By increasing your bandwidth to 256Kbps, the video and audio quality increases drastically. I would recommend 384Kbps of bandwidth if you can afford it. It provides the perfect balance of quality and cost. The motion is great, and audio is clear and understandable.

For a personal conferencing solution, it doesn't make sense to purchase excessive amounts of bandwidth as the quality of the camera and microphone is your quality bottleneck. Conference room solutions provide a wider variety of bandwidth as you can start at ISDN, move into frame relay, or even install a full T1. In boardroom solutions, more bandwidth is recommended to take advantage of the investment in room upgrades and equipment.

Network Medium

There are three primary network mediums in use. One of the most widely used is ISDN. While there have been great strides in Ethernet and T1 connectivity, ISDN has remained popular because it is inexpensive and provides dedicated bandwidth. Most vendors support up to four concurrent ISDN connections for 512Kbps video calls.

A step up is a T1 leased line. This will allow you to have a video call of up to 1.544Mbps, which has the same quality as a television program--providing your camera and microphones are high quality. The cost for this solution is a detriment unless it is used frequently. If the video conferencing equipment is used several hours a day, a T1 line may be less expensive than ISDN long-distance charges.

The final network medium is a hybrid solution that uses your existing Ethernet network, WAN connections, and Internet connections. Current video conferencing standards are very accepting of IP-based WAN connections and calls placed over the Internet. Our solution places 384Kbps calls on an Ethernet network, through a fractional private T1, to our sales office in Detroit. Most of our calls are to the Detroit office so our ISDN connectivity is rarely used.

Outside of the business arena, telephone lines can be used for video conferencing with your $100 camera. In this solution, you would dial up to your Internet Service Provider (ISP) and use an application such as ICQ or MSN Messenger to initiate your calls. The quality is poor and drops out occasionally, but is better if you are using a broad-band, high-speed connection.

Camera Movement

If you are looking at a conference or boardroom solution, the camera that comes with the solution should zoom, pan right and left, move up and down, automatically focus, and have backlight compensation for dark conditions. All movement is performed from a remote control that's very simple to operate. Our executives learned it on their own!

Auto Move to Speaking Participant

This feature automatically focuses the camera on the person who is talking. Some vendors include this in the base configuration, and others sell it as an add-on. What makes this feature work is conditioning of the room. Acoustic wallpaper is used to muffle background sounds, which can throw off the automatic microphone positioning.

Connect to NetMeeting Client

In some instances, the remote end has only a personal video conferencing solution. Microsoft's free NetMeeting application provides video conferencing and collaboration support. While it's not the best performer or quality provider, it does the job.

When NetMeeting is installed on a PC, it provides support for the H.323 protocol, allowing the PC to communicate with the higher-end video conferencing solutions. Support is also available for the T.120 protocol, which allows features such as whiteboard sharing, file transfer, and remote screen control. With the combination of these features, you can conduct a fairly good video call and collaborate on documents easily.

LAN Rebroadcast

Suppose your CEO makes an announcement to the board of directors through a video conference call, and he later wants the company to see the conference. With a LAN rebroadcast, you can email a URL to your users, and they can see the conference as if it were live. The conference can also be stored for future broadcasting.

A similar function enables streaming to the desktop so that users can watch the live broadcast. This does require a fair amount of bandwidth demand on your corporate network.

Multi-Monitor Support

In most cases, you will want at least two television monitors with the video conferencing solution. One will show the remote end, the second will show your room or a preview of what the other end will see. You'll need more than two monitors if you have a document camera or are plugging a laptop into the solution for viewing documents or presentations such as sales pitches.

Picture-in-Picture

A less-expensive solution than multiple monitors is a picture-in-picture solution. While the bulk of the monitor displays a presentation or a document on a document camera, a small frame within the picture will show you either a preview of what the other end will see or the participants at the other end.

There is some flexibility with this solution in terms of what you wish to see. Typically, there will be a window in one of the corners of the monitor; this window uses approximately one-fifth of the screen. You can choose which corner and also which of your cameras to display if you have multiple cameras.

Far-End Camera Control

Far-end camera control allows you to have full control of the camera on the remote end. Use your remote control to pan or zoom the remote camera.

NTSC vs. PAL

National Television System Committee (NTSC) is the North American standard for television quality and transmitting. Phase Altering Line (PAL) is the European equivalent. The biggest difference between the two is that NTSC provides 525 lines of resolution with 60 half-frames per second. PAL provides 625 lines of resolution with 50 half-frames per second. Clearly, there is a considerable difference between the two, and your video conferencing solution should accommodate this difference when calling to the other standard.

PC or Black Box

Video conferencing comes in either a PC-based solution or a black box-dedicated solution. A black box solution is also referred to as a set-top box or appliance.

A PC-based solution provides you more future upgrade paths through CPU and software upgrades. It also allows more flexibility in terms of the software you can install. With a PC-based system, you can install client software on your Windows 2000 network and/or AS/400 and have the results displayed at the other end. One detriment, however, is that you'll lose your connection when a CPU, power supply, or general protection fault occurs.

Black box solutions are my preference. I want to implement it and forget about it. If there is a problem, a same-day, four-hour response contract ensures that my system is up and running quickly. If I want the flexibility of the PC-based system, I have to pay for it through add-on hardware.

Multi-Conference Bridges

Suppose that someday management decides they want more than two locations in a call. To accomplish this, you need a multi-conference bridge that provides a single point for multiple sites to dial into and repeats the signal to each of the site attendees. Some providers lease time out on their bridges, but the cost can be prohibitive.

You can now buy bridges that provide for more than two participants in a video call. Again, they come in either black box or PC-based solutions, and they offer too many features to mention here. The cost starts at around $8,000 for the software on a PC-based solution, but you can achieve a considerable ROI if you use it frequently.

A few vendors provide multi-conference bridges as a standard feature, and I feel that most will include it in the next year or two to keep up with the trailblazers.

This feature usually allows only a maximum of three locations. Of course, if you have more than three sites participating in a video call, the result might be pandemonium, so three may be all you need.

Vendors

There are four main vendors in this field: Polycom, Sony, VCON, and VTEL. When I initially searched for vendors, I found that the most widely supported products are from Polycom. It was hard to find a value-added reseller (VAR) that did not sell Polycom. However, I'll review the solutions each vendor sells for each size.

Polycom

Polycom supports all three sizes nicely. At the personal level is ViaVideo, which includes the camera/microphone that attaches to your computer with a USB cable. It is lightweight, and integrated processing minimizes your computer's CPU use.

ViewStation is designed for conference rooms. Having purchased this solution, I can tell you firsthand that it is elegant. We allocated eight hours of consulting time for the setup of the device and didn't use one minute of it. The setup is easy, and the quality is great at 384Kbps. As with other conference room solutions, an optional internal Web server allows you to perform configuration tasks. This saves quite a bit of time when you have multiple sites; remote users simply plug everything in, and you perform the configuration remotely.

Polycom's boardroom solution is called iPower, which is a highly scalable, PC-based solution. The base system comes with very little as it is designed to be tailored to each individual implementation.

Sony

Sony is another popular brand, but I experienced a lot of frustration when trying to obtain a quote for one of their systems. I spent most of the time on the phone and was unable to find out if Sony sold directly or through channels. We excluded them from our bidding process because of this. However, they do offer several solutions, which probably have the quality and durability you're looking for, but they're probably more expensive than the other vendors' solutions.

In the personal arena, there is the Trinicom 500. It comes with a camera, a headset, and a PC card. Because it does not connect through a USB port, this solution does not share well.

For conference rooms, Sony offers its PCS-1600 black box solution and its TriniCom 3000 PC-based solution. Both are very nice. TriniCom is probably the only PC-based solution that I would consider because Sony uses its own PC as part of the solution, not some thrown-together PC off the street. Both support all the current standards, and TriniCom offers additional collaboration features.

Sony's next step up--the TriniCom 5100Plus--may or may not be considered a boardroom solution. It has more network medium options than the lower-end solutions have, but it doesn't have the same "room fixture" feel as other boardroom solutions. I'd say this solution is midway between the two upper classes.

VCON

VCON has less brand recognition but is widely used. It has a good spread of video-conferencing solutions, as well as centralized management software and multi-conferencing bridges. The ViGO personal conferencing solution comes in three flavors and connects using a USB cable.

The Falcon IP is VCON's solution for the conference room. It is a black box solution that directly competes with Polycom's ViewStation. The feature list is almost identical, and I wonder if one vendor licenses the technology from the other. It also includes a Web browser configuration interface.

Like Sony, VCON offers one more solution that's not quite a conference room solution and not quite a boardroom solution--its Media Connect series. If you have a niche need in the middle, this would be a good candidate for you.

VTEL

VTEL (also not a widely recognized brand) is the vendor we purchased our original video conferencing solution from. That was approximately eight years ago, and the system served its purpose for many years. VTEL has been around since 1986 and has quite a bit of experience in the field. They focus on a "PC-centric platform" and offer no black box solutions.

The Vista MX is a complete personal video-conferencing solution in a small package. There is no PC required as it's built right into the solution. It also comes with three USB ports for adding additional functionality.

The Vista VX is similar to the MX but is rack-mountable and geared toward the conference room. Again, it's a PC-based solution that you can integrate directly into your network. You could also install Client Access/400 on it and train employees at a remote site!

Galaxy PRO is VTEL's answer for the boardroom. It is highly customizable, which is perfect for tailoring it. Unlike other vendors that I reviewed, VTEL provides with a three-year hardware and software warranty.

It's a Wrap!

Although drastic times call for drastic measures, video conferencing is no longer something to be viewed as drastic. Today's video conferencing is simple to size, understand, and set up. Cost is still a concern but is easily offset when your CFO signs fewer expense checks and your employees spend more time at home with their families.

Chris Green is a Senior Network Support Specialist located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He has seven years experience focusing on the AS/400 and networking technologies. Utilizing this experience, he has authored over 30 articles and several white papers and has co-authored an IBM Redbook. For questions or comments, you can E-mail him at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .