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IMTC 2010, A year summary

January 6, 2011 By Itzhak Wolkowicz Leave a Comment

It’s been a great year for IMTC and the Telecom Industry as a whole, some of our 2010 highlights Were:

* IMTC 2025 Global Virtual Conference was held in April 7th-8th using Radvision’s Scopia and lifestream platforms for broadcast. In the 2025 event we looked into the question – “How will your living room look like in the year 2025?” The two day event was a phenomenal success and attracted hundreds of viewers and many participants from major companies in the Telecom and Video conferencing fields (Cisco, Polycom, Radvision, NXP, PV and more). All the Videos from the 2025 event are available in our Youtube page and Here.

* SuperOP! 2010 - The annual industry flagship interoperability testing event, was highly successful and brought together more than 50 engineers from 14 companies from around the world. IMTC president Anatoli Levine wrote about it: “SuperConnect 2010, consisting of about 35 endpoints and servers, including a 3-screen telepresence system, took about 37 minutes from start to finish, with brilliant High Definition Video shining all over the room”.

* IMTC SIP Parity AG participated in SIPit27 Event – This year event was focused mainly on Video Interoperability, rather than voice. You can read the event summary Here.

* IMTC took ownership of the Telepresence Interoperability Protocol (TIP) protocol and established a new TIP Activity Group.  Read the TIP section for more details or send an email to TIP_info@imtc.org.

* IMTC First TIP Webinar was held at December 08. We had connectivity problems that prevented some of the speakers and registered users to participate – We apologize for that and will offer recordings of the event.
Additional TIP events are planned – further updates will be announced via our blog.

* IMTC Annual Meeting was held in November 3, 2010.  IMTC had a joint panel on the future of video with speakers from IMTC, UCIF and SIP Forum.

* IMTC President, Anatoli Levin Participated at AppTime Conference in LA, at the 4GWE/ITExpo event. Anatoli was also interviewed by Erin Monda for TMCNET 4GWE news.

* IMTC IMS AG leader and BoD member, Andrea Basso, participated at the 3G00/ETSI IMS November 2010 workshop on Implementation, Deployment and Testing.

We are looking forwards into 2011 events and activities – Stay Tuned!

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About the writer: Itzhak Wolkowicz
Filed Under: 3G-324M, IMS, IMTC News, Interoperability, SIP, Technology insight, Telepresence, Unified Communication Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

The First IMS AG Face2Face Event is Here

September 25, 2007 By Kfir Pravda 1 Comment

By Tsahi Levent-Levi

It’s about time this happened. We’ve been working for several months now in the IMTC IMS AG for this moment – the first face-to-face interoperability event of our group.

Why is this important?

Up until today, no real IMS testing was done for the client side in any methodical way. Sure, the IMS Forum is doing PlugFest events and the GSMA is also doing some basic interoperability testing for their specification. Nevertheless, there’s no real place where handset vendors and middleware/software providers for handsets can gather around on a regular basis and deal with interoperability. The IMS AG is just that place.

What do we focus on?

We currently deal with Video Share as an IMS service that we are testing, focusing on the client itself. Not what is required on the network side and how billing is done but rather how two mobile clients can call each other, negotiate the parameters they will use for the call and share a video session between each other. We will be moving on to additional client-side service aspects as they develop – we started with Video Share simply because it seems like one of the services of IMS that will be deployed first – I believe AT&T is the first of many operators that will focus on Video Share in the next couple of months.

What do we do?

We talk once a week or two, depending on availability. Companies in the group join a conference call to discuss matters at hand. In these calls we discuss a wide range of topics:

  • Drafting out our test case document
  • Establishing and discussing liaison connections with other organizations (GSMA, IMS Forum, OMTP and others)
  • Scheduling interoperability events

Our goal?

To make sure that once operators decide to deploy services such as Video Share, they will be able to choose any phone vendor they want and be confident of the level of interoperability provided. This means that operators would rather take handsets from vendors who are actually test interoperability in the IMTC IMS AG.

October interoperability event

Our first event is scheduled for October 10-12 this year. RADVISION, my company, is hosting this event along with the 3G-324M AG, which will do their own interoperability testing there.

We are planning to convene after the event and publish the first official test cases document for Video Share from the IMTC. As usual, I am sure we will have some comments to the 3GPP and the GSMA that might require some clarifications or changes to the specifications – that happens when an activity group in the IMTC starts doing interoperability and places a specification under its magnifying glass…

If you do develop communication products, you must know that interoperability is important. What do you do to close this gap of interoperability in your products?

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About the writer: Kfir Pravda
Filed Under: 3G-324M, IMS, Interoperability Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Would you like to meet F2F in the Holy land?

September 25, 2007 By Kfir Pravda 2 Comments

By Oren Libis

On October 8 -12, the company that I work in, RADVISION, is going to host the next IMTC 3G-324M AG F2F event in Tel-Aviv, Israel, and I am in charge of the organization of the event. This is not the first time RADVISION organizes such an event. The first event took place on February 2006 and yet the upcoming event is exciting just as much and even more.

I participated in many IMTC F2F events in the past 5 years and I traveled to many countries but hosting an event in your home country is completely different feeling. The fact that many people from different companies, countries and cultures get together in one place and work together is something wonderful but when it happens in your home field it is even more wonderful.

I very much enjoy hosting these people which I consider friends, telling them about my country, showing them the holy places, elaborating on the local customs and introducing them to the local food. This is amazing time and again to see their reaction to that. This makes me very proud in my country and very enthusiastic to show more and more.

In the previous event we visited in the holiest place in Israel – Jerusalem. This time we are going to visit in Caesarea. Our goal is to improve the hosting from event to event and so we have some more surprises this time that I am not going to tell otherwise I will spoil the surprise.

And yes, we are even going to work here between visits and test 3G-324M devices. But, I am sure that the special atmosphere and the activities around the event will ease the pressure of the work and make it more pleasant.

I hope that more and more people even from companies outside IMTC read this post and decide to join the event. I hope to see you F2F next month in the Holy Land…

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About the writer: Kfir Pravda
Filed Under: 3G-324M, Interoperability Tagged With: , , ,

Will 3G-324M MONA be here this Christmas?

September 9, 2007 By Kfir Pravda Leave a Comment

By Oren Libis

MONA (H.324 Annex K), the chosen call setup time reduction technique, was approved by the ITU-T and 3GPP over a year ago. How come we don’t see it in the market yet? It is mainly an issue of standardization and timing.

From past experience in 3G market, it takes about 6 – 12 months since a company has a prototype till the first model gets into the market. This happened in other standards and it has happened in 3G-324M time and again – WNSRP and channel negotiation conflicts are examples of this.

During this time many 3G-324M terminal vendors are working vigorously and intensively on their MONA implementations. Some of the implementations are more mature than others but all in all there is much more work to be done.

Implementing is not enough – you now need to test it. Most of the testing sessions are conducted in the 3G-324M Activity Group Face2Face events of IMTC. In these events many vendors perform interoperability testing against others but this is not that easy for new standards. H.324 Annex K is quite a complicated technique, which changed significantly the way 3G-324M call setup was done till now, so one can expect many interoperability clashes in the beginning of the testing – we’ve seen those in the last three events already. Obviously, the prototypes also need to maintain a very high level of interoperability with legacy terminals which makes it even harder. However, the interoperability level gets improved from event to event and the implementations mature as time passes. The upcoming Face2Face event in Tel-Aviv, Israel on October 8-12 will definitely show high level of interoperability as this is the 4th event that MONA is being tested.

Taking into account all of the above, I would expect to see MONA enabled models out in the market during the second half of 2008. Some initial models might actually hit the market prior to that, and maybe, just maybe, there will be a vendor or two that make it to Christmas this year.

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About the writer: Kfir Pravda
Filed Under: 3G-324M, Interoperability Tagged With: , , ,

Beginner’s Guide to 3G-324M MONA

August 15, 2007 By Kfir Pravda 1 Comment

By Oren Libis

MONA is a call setup time reduction technique used in 3G-324M. In the past several weeks I have noticed that a lot of handset developers and operators out there – not members of the IMTC, are a bit confused at what MONA is and how it really works.

The 3G-324M Activity Group in the IMTC is working hard in the past year on MONA. We’re doing interoperability testing whenever we can and we are going to meet again during October 8-12 for a face-to-face interoperability event with MONA as one of the main items.

What is MONA?

MONA is a call setup time reduction specification for 3G-324M. It is a set of 3 different techniques: MPC, SPC and ACP. I won’t go into the technical aspects of each, but it is important to understand the following points:

  1. Each of these techniques alone can reduce call setup time to below 1 second.
  2. Each of these techniques has its advantages and disadvantages – this is why MONA specifies three different techniques and not only one.

MONA Classes

3G-324M MONA specifies in addition to these 3 techniques, 3 different classes. 3G-324M products need to support only one of these classes. Each class indicates which of the 3 techniques (MPC, SPC and ACP) need to be implemented:

  • Class 1, which requires MPC, SPC and ACP
  • Class 2, which requires MPC and ACP
  • Class 3, which requires SPC and ACP

The different MONA classes are interoperable with each other. For example, if two handsets support MONA, one supporting class 1 and the other supporting class 2, the call that will be established will either end up using MPC or ACP; if one supports class 2 and the other supports class 3, the call will simply use ACP.

What does is mean to you?

  • If you are a developer, you should choose to develop the class that makes the most sense to you in terms of resources, footprint, memory and time to market.
  • If you are a mobile operator, you should not force vendors to support a specific class – let your vendors choose their own class – in the end result, you will still get below 1 second of call setup time and you will be giving the vendors some flexibility.

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About the writer: Kfir Pravda
Filed Under: 3G-324M, Interoperability, Technology insight Tagged With: , ,
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