Is HD voice Really Here?
May 26, 2009
Written By Anatoli Levine, IMTC President and Director, Product Management – Americas at RADVISION
To follow up on my previous post, I would like to continue talking about HD Voice. However, now I’m armed and dangerous – with the knowledge, that is. HD Communications Summit which took place on Thursday, May 21st, in New York City, brought together an outstanding line up of speakers with an amazing depth of knowledge on the subject. The event was organized by Jeff Pulver and Dan Berninger – both can be regarded as VoIP pioneers and experts on the subject.
So what did I learn? A lot. One thing for sure – HD Voice is here. The technology is here. Yep, we know how to make everyone to sound better, juicier, more vivid and live. Challenge is – “we” is a small technical community. Nobody else knows – and nobody asks for it – therefore, it is not happening. Two excellent presentations, one by Jeff Rodman, Polycom’s CTO, and one by Martyn Humphries, GM of VoIP Group at Broadcom, very well explained and demonstrated the differences between regular telephone speech and HD Voice coming with all the live nuances. Nevertheless, many years of bad mobile calls taught us to ask for only two things – first, that your call will actually connect – and second, that it will not drop in a middle ( and if it does drop – start from the “first” again). Great quality voice – sure, will take it – but don’t ask us to pay for it – and again, the technology is not happening. It will require quite a bit of effort to educate and convince – Jeff Pulver’s idea to petition for “HDV” campaign with FCC is good – still, just don’t drop my calls, please…
Another interesting revelation for me was the fact HD Voice is more than just a codec. Having spend many years at RADVISION, where video is king, the screen by itself is practically always good, the key to the good quality video is really in the mathematical wonders of the codec. Not the case with audio – while codec is important, what can be described by single word acoustics is equally or more important – it is choice of materials and actual mechanical design of the earpiece or a headset, or speakers will actually determine if HD voice will be actually HD. I guess this actually make sound delivery more art compare to a video delivery? Huh, I’m working for the video company in the end of the day, I guess need to be more careful with conclusions.
So for the quick recap – technology is ready, we mastered the art of sound, there is no demand, am I missing anything else? Yeah, technology is ready, and the problem is – too much of it. There is at least twice as many wideband codecs than narrow band codecs. Great selection of not-interoperable codecs! Of course that makes transcoding very important, but also prevents us from leaping forward, as we can’t achieve level of deployable interoperability. G.722 everyone, please!
Here is another recap – technology is ready, we mastered the art of sound, there is no demand, and interoperability is not where it should be.
As I’m wearing two hats here, what it all means? For RADVISION, we will continue to make the picture better and brighter – it worth thousand words anyway, right? However, clear Voice (HD, it is) greatly enhances the picture, so we gladly embrace the “complete HD experience” momentum in the industry. For IMTC, it sounds like a textbook case of “what IMTC does the best” – we can get together all the players in the industry, create base profile and test plan, run interoperability testing, create excitement with amazing clarity of the voice, educate the market and declare a victory! Sounds simple? I hope it is. Let’s start…
IMTC Forum 2008 – Social Communication
January 12, 2009
This is a full video of the following panel:
Enterprise and Social Networks – Boundaries and Opportunities
Social networks are no longer the sole domain of consumers and artists. LinkedIn and Facebook could provide benefit to business users – as well as change the way they learn about they competitors, and interact with employees, and partners. How does these players affect enterprise communication needs Panelists: Peter Saint-Andre, Director of Standards, Jabber & Anatoli Levine, Director of Product Management, RADVISION, and IMTC President.
Moderator: Kfir Pravda, VP Marketing IMTC, CEO Pravda Media
Unified Communications Experts meet in San Francisco
October 14, 2008
IMTC is having its annual event on the 12th and 13th of November. The event is focused on unified communication and the way it supports business processes in the enterprise, as well as the blurring lines between corporate systems and online applications.
We have great speakers at the event – starting with Joe Burton, CTO of unified communication group in Cisco, Matt Collier, SVP of LifeSize communications, Ty Wang, Senior director of Product Marketing at Oracle, Sridhar Vembu, CEO of Zoho, Hakon Dahla, CTO of Tandberg, and Anatoli Levine, IMTC President. The event covers both cutting edge technologies (such as the world beyond H264, Scalable video coding today, and conformance methodologies) as well as business issues such as unified communication beyond click to call, social networks and the enterprise, Multimedia and tele-health and many more.
It is an exciting event, taking place in an exciting location – St. Regis hotel in San Francisco (personally I am asking myself where is the nearest Apple store, after today’s announcements). I am moderating several panels in the first day, and will be there through the event.
If you are in this business, or want to meet in San Francisco, you should come and say Hi. Here is the agenda, and you can register here.
My Mother Uses Skype – Why Bother With Standards?
April 15, 2007
By Kfir Pravda
A panel discussion from Spring VON 2007 in San Jose, California, exploring the question of the advantages of open standards vs. proprietary software in the world of VoIP deployments. With the runaway success of Skype, members of IMTC and one brave Skype employee ask, why bother with standards?
Moderator: Anatoli Levine – Sr. Director, Software Support and Services, RADVISION
Jonathan Christensen – Sr. Director, Skype
Håkon Dahle – Chief Technologist, TANDBERG
Kfir Pravda – President, Pravda Marketing Services
Peter Saint-Andre – Director of Standards, Jabber Inc.
Shantanu Sarkar – Sr. Manager, Cisco Systems
Chris Steck – Director of Technology Strategy, RealNetworks
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Why do we need marketers in standard bodies?
April 5, 2007
By Kfir Pravda
Ok, I am a marketer. I have engineering background, but I am certainly on the “let’s find the story” side than the “where to plug this router” side. And I can tell you, I think that standardization process needs more marketers around.
So now you ask yourself why, right?
The answer is simple – the current process takes too much time. As such, it makes standards irrelevant from business perspective. We are talking about SIP for ages. Skype has bigger market share. Why? Cause engineers and marketers set together and solved problems based on specific use cases. So, engineers should be happy to have marketers around – not for advice, but in order to sort out all the different issues on the table between companies.
Standards suppose to support services and products. Therefore, they are supposed to be based on some kind of requirements. These requirements should be, in my opinion, based on market needs. And market needs are represented by marketers, not by engineering functions.
So why in most standardization organizations we have almost no representation? Even IMTC, the organization publishing this blog have only one marketer on board (yours truly).
What is your opinion?
Until video becomes personal
March 22, 2007
When you are at such an exciting technology conference as VON is, of course the desire is to see and hear every talk – and of course, it doesn’t work like this, especially considering RADVISION booth duties and IMTC promotion and networking. But I was very happy that I managed to attend Zohar Zisapel talk about video. Zohar is RADVISION Chairman of the Board, and a Video over IP industry veteran.
I really liked what I heard, probably because it resonated so much with my own perspective on the real-time Video. Just to reflect back, I had startling moment at IMTC Fall Forum 2001 in Seattle, where Rich Baker, one of the PictureTel founders, said the following: “in the enterprise, Video is not mission-critical application, and voice and e-mail are”. This was something I never realized before, and from that moment on, I kept repeating that sentiment almost as a mantra.
Enterprises don’t have compelling reason to put video on every desktop… until video becomes personal. Until people will be able to use video to connect to their families and friends, there will be no driving force behind video on every desktop. And this is what Zohar was talking about and vividly demonstrating with a number of excellent video clips. The ubiquitous video connectivity is becoming part of our daily life (well, not necessarily in US, yet).
With advent of 3G mobile telephony the ability to see your kids at any time, and to witness remote events, and to conduct business meetings from the beach is simply priceless. And as Zohar pointed out, video does worth a thousand words, as he clearly demonstrated with last clip in his presentation, showing a number of short silent video fragments, which were delivering very powerful emotions.
And then there was only one question coming from the audience (and that was the question I was expecting to hear) – when 3G will come to US. Well, nobody was able to answer that question, but with all the new phones, supporting Wi-Fi, 3G and EVDO, my hopes are really high that even US will come out from the stone cellular age. Now, we just need to ensure all those technologies are interoperable…
SuperOp! 2007 – The Interoperability Testing Event
February 27, 2007
IMTC is holding its major test event – SuperOp!, in Jesie Italy in April 2007. The event, bringing together experts from across the globe, helps our member companies to roll out better products, after they were tested in real life environment, with competing companies. As a collaborative effort, it has a proven advantage to our members, in product readiness and shortened time to market. On top of rigorous testing effort, engineers from all around the world have the opportunity to network, discuss industry issues, and have some fun – organized trips, parties, and drinks are all part of the package.
The event is a must event for all companies and organizations delivering multimedia telecommunications products and services today, and provides unprecedented opportunities to interact and test new or next generation products and services.
IMTC and Aethra will be host to engineers from across the globe at the Federico II Hotel in Jesi, Italy from April 23 to April 27. IMTC AG leaders along with Aethra, Polycom, RADVISION, Tandberg, LifeSize and Ximpo have planned and will coordinate the event, along with the kind support of Regione Marche. Infrastructure equipment used for the event will be provided by Aethra, Polycom and Telecom Italia.
During the event, a live video link-up will take place with Andrew Davis, Senior Analyst and Managing Partner at Wainhouse Research, the independent market research firm that focuses on critical issues in the Unified Communications and rich media conferencing fields. The video link will take place during the Wainhouse Research Collaboration Summit in Berlin, an event focusing on new solutions for unified collaborative communications.
SuperOp! 2007 is open for registration until March 21.
See you all in Jesie!
Anatoli Levine – President of International Multimedia Telecommunications Consortium
January 15, 2007
Anatoli Levine is currently Senior Director of Software Support at RADVISION. He joined RADVISION in 1998 as a senior software engineer, designing and implementing the company’s H.323 solutions. Since 1999, Anatoli has led a team of engineers that provide: pre-sales, post-sales, custom design and engineering services for all RADVISION Technology Business Unit’s products.
Anatoli has more than 15 years of experience in engineering and customer management, software design and development, network programming, telecommunications systems, security and computer graphics systems research.
Since 1999, Anatoli has been closely involved with International Multimedia Telecommunications Consortium (IMTC) activities, where he chaired a number of technical Activity Groups and served on the Board of Directors for 4 years. Currently, Anatoli is a President of the IMTC Consortium. In all these roles, Anatoli is working on the development of technology and solutions to ensure the highest level of interoperability among different vendors implementing real-time multimedia and content delivery standards.
When Anatoli is not busy promoting interoperability and RADVISION technology, he likes spending time with his wife Victoria and their three kids. Anatoli is a passionate cook and wine connoisseur, and travel is one of his favorite leisure activities. Anatoli also has a 1st degree Black Belt in Taekwondo and continues studying Martial Arts.
Tsahi Levent-Levi is a seasoned product manager and system architect at RADVISION. His experience includes product management and development, project management, with a strong background in development and management of complex VoIP projects. Tsahi currently manages a wide range of VoIP and 3G client products, which enjoy significant market share in the industry. His experience includes product management and development, project management, with a strong background in development and management of complex VoIP projects.
Tsahi currently manages a wide range of VoIP and 3G client products, which enjoy significant market share in the industry.
In addition, Tsahi serves as co-chairman of the IMTC IMS Activity Group, which focuses on interoperability issues relating to IMS client applications. He also regularly participates in related 3GPP standardization conferences, where he works tirelessly to improve the standards for the industry as a whole.
When Tsahi isn’t editing his blog on how to make video-based telecom networks work, he enjoys developing new culinary innovations is his suburban Tel Aviv kitchen, or practicing Argentinean Tango with his lovely wife, a ballroom dancing instructor, while Beige, their loyal Labrador, looks on. He can be reached at tsahil@radvision.com
Oren Libis is a veteran project manager and developer in the area of 3G, VoIP and multimedia streaming protocols and standardization. His experience includes project management and development, with a strong background in 3G-324M.
He actively promotes call setup time improvements and standards within the ITU-T framework and serves as co-chairman of the IMTC 3G-324M Activity Group. He was one of the original developers and holds several joint 3G-324M patents, including ACN and MONA call setup techniques, widely adopted by the mobile industry. As a senior project manager at RADVISION, Oren serves a large and growing number of 3G-324M handset manufacturers who deploy RADVISION technology. He can be reached at orenl@radvision.com.
