IMTC Telepresence Activity Group is the activity group who’s goal is to achieve Telepresence interoperability – The Telepresence AG research will help the IETF standardize the field.
We have asked the AG chairs – Allyn Romanow and Stephen Botzko to explain us about their work at the Telepresence activity group:
What is the telepresence activity group?
The purpose of the TP AG is to consider topics that help Telepresence interoperability. Telepresence is a wonderful being-there experience, but alas, systems from different vendors don’t easily interwork, limiting the potential ubiquitous growth of Telepresence. The AG focus on how to solve interoperability issues.
What does your activity group offer to companies in the telepresence field?
The AG offers companies the opportunity to collaborate closely with other vendors in creating a truly easy-to-use and widespread telepresence experience.
What is the role of the group chairmen?
The chairs of the TP AG help to organize the work of the group, including facilitating phone meetings and face-to-face meetings and maintaining a website.
What are the group greatest achievements to date?
The original goal of the group was to tackle the largest outstanding gap in standardization of telepresence – a standard way of describing multiple media streams. To this end, our goal was to introduce this issue into a standards organization. We have achieved this goal in a very timely fashion the IETF is chartering a working group to standardize the treatment of multiple streams in telepresence systems.
In addition, the ITU has started a Telepresence group to work on a wide range of important interoperability issues
The TP AG was extremely effective in describing the work that needs to be done for standardizing multiple streams, and produced a first draft charter for the IETF and a first draft Use Case document for the IETF.
What are the major goals for 2010/2011?
We intend to fully support, participate,and promote the standardization activities in both the ITU-T and the IETF. This will require the active participation of the AG members in these bodies. One goal is to ensure that these standards are architected to meet our industry’s present and future need for interoperability in this rapidly growing product area. Another goal is that these standards be developed quickly and broadly adopted.
As these standards become more well-defined (late in 2011), the AG will address interoperability testing.
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Allyn is a Technical Leader in the Telepresence group at Cisco Systems, where she currently leads the open standards work for Telepresence products. Allyn has substantial experience in creating new networking technologies, including ATM, RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) over IP, and Ethernet security. In her previous standards development work, she was the Area Director for the Transport area in the IETF, which included real time applications, editor in IEEE 802.1 (LAN Architecture), and she helped to found the ATM Forum.
About Cisco
Cisco, (NASDAQ: CSCO), the worldwide leader in networking that transforms how people connect, communicate and collaborate, celebrates 25 years of technological innovation, operating excellence and corporate social responsibility. Information about Cisco can be found at http://www.cisco.com.
Stephen Botzko:
Stephen is a Director of Standardization and Technology at Polycom, and leads the standardization work for Telepresence. Stephen has over 20 years of experience developing traditional video conferencing products, and more recently has been focused on telepresence. He holds several patents on various aspects of videoconferencing technology. He is the editor of several ITU-T standards, including H.323, H.239, and H.241, and is the rapporteur of the ITU-T work on telepresence (ITU-T Q5/16).
About Polycom
Polycom, Inc. (Nasdaq: PLCM) is a global leader in unified communications solutions with industry-leading telepresence, video, voice and infrastructure solutions built on open standards. Polycom powers smarter conversations, transforming lives and businesses worldwide. www.polycom.com
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Industry News Summary – Global Crossing, Skype, HTML 5 and more
How Skype plans to expand its business
Gigaom wrote an article about how Skype plans to grow its business beside offering premium features, such as group chat;
Skype success with its recent IPO is highly debated as currently the majority of Skype revenue is generated by the Skype-Out feature (86% of Skype net revenue). While the “freemium” model is rather popular and so-far proven in the case of Skype, one must wonder what will happen if major competitors will enter its field. A wide verity of business services might be just the thing Skype needs to remain a fierce competitor in the VoIP world.
France Telecom (under the Orange brand) beings offering Quad-Play deals
Under the name “Open Orange”, France Telecom will offer packages that will start at 39.9 euro per month. The offers will include mobile calls, unlimited SMS, broadband, IPTV and free calls to fixed lines in France. Triple and Quad packages are already popular at around the world, being offered by several us cable companies and in UK by Virgin Media. At IMTC 2025 we’ve talked about Triple-Play from a developer and a provider perspective:
Cable Operators to bring subscription TV to tablet devices
According to IntoMobile.com, at least seven of the ten major cable operators in the US are looking at tablets as a new platform for consuming subscription TV. The connection between tablets and smart-phones to TV viewing seems inevitable and even too obvious - will we see tablet offerings from the Cable operators themselves?
Lighsquared LTE swapping spectrum with Inmarsat
The new 4G whole-sale operator we mentioned in our previous post will swap channels with Inmarsat as their current satellite spectrum license isn’t LTE optimized.
Are HTML 5 and H264 a really open alternative for the Web?
Christopher Blizzard, a known open source evangelist wrote an article about H264 and his definition of “open”. Christopher warns us from the likes of GIF, a once prominent graphic format that was widely used over the web – and became less and less compelling after Unisys started to enforce their GIF-related patents.
Global Crossings – Buying or selling?
Lightreading.com wrote an article about Global Crossings latest financial projections for 2010 and future company strategy -
“CEO John Legere and Global Crossing CMO David Carey, say in an interview this week that they believe their company is operating from a position of strength, but expecting to find ways to grow both organically and by acquisition or merger.”
Either by buying or selling consolidation is an expected process in the industry – it only remains to be seen if a competitor to AT&T and Verizon will arise and if Global Crossing will play a major role in forming it.
LTE vs. 3G? An analyst viewpoint