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David Benham from Cisco on “What is TIP?”

August 16, 2010 By David Benham Leave a Comment

What is this Thumb, Index, Pinky (TIP) thing?

Actually, no, TIP stands for the Telepresence Interoperability Protocol.   But the positional relationship of the one’s thumb, index and pinky fingers makes for a useful analogy to describe one of the key design goals of the TIP protocol.

While there are several standards for robust multimedia conferencing, such SIP, RTP, H.264, H.323, none of have yet dealt with the special challenges of preserving the experience in a conference consisting of many multi-screen endpoints as well as a mix of multi-screen and single-screen endpoints.
In other words, without additional mechanisms, receiving endpoints would only know they received three fingers.  They wouldn’t know how to arrange them in a way that you would recognize as a hand, with the thumb, index and pinky fingers in their proper place on the receiving end.
Preserving those “in-person” positional relationships in a multi-point conference, with other video and audio streams (or other fingers in my analogy) switching in and out quickly from multiple single screen and multi-screen endpoints, is an important goal for any immersive Telepresence system.

TIP does this and a whole bunch more to help enable interoperability between today’s Telepresence systems, but I am going to need some different  analogies to continue.   While I am working on those, please see this informative presentation about TIP.

David Benham
Director of Engineering
TelePresence Technology Group
Cisco Systems

About the writer: David Benham
Filed Under: IMTC News, Interoperability, Telepresence Tagged With: , , , , ,

Thank You Mr. Jobs

June 8, 2010 By Anatoli Levine 1 Comment

Image representing Steve Jobs as depicted in C...

Image via CrunchBase

Yesterday, Steve Jobs, Apple‘s CEO, Introduced FaceTime , a video telephony solution for iPhone 4. It is based on  open standards and integrated in next generation iPhone as a simple to use video telephony product.
Apple is known for its ability to revolutionize industries. iTunes, iPod, iPhone and iPad – all changed their respective markets.

We expect that visual communication, delivered in Apple’s style – simple, reliable and sexy – will do exactly the same for mobile visual communications as the whole.

The introduction of FaceTime by Apple is a vote of confidence in visual communication, and IMTC is certain that it will increase the uptake of mobile video telephony.

IMTC has the biggest visual communication expert pool, as well as rich history of ensuring interoperability and promoting adoption of standards-based visual communication technologies. From mobile telephony, to desktop video conferencing, to Telepresence, IMTC has the most active interoperability and testing groups in the industry.

As such, we are excited about yesterday’s news, and looking forward to support FaceTime adoption as an open industry standard.

Anatoli Levine, President,  IMTC

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About the writer: Anatoli Levine
Filed Under: IMS, Technology insight, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

IMTC SuperOp! 2010 (New date)

April 19, 2010 By Anatoli Levine 1 Comment

April 26-30, 2010 – IMTC SuperOp! 2010,  IMTC premier annual Interoperability Testing event, will take place in Jesi (Ancona), Italy. During the event, IMTC members will get together to test various IP Video communications technologies, including Video-Conferencing over SIP and H.323, Packet Switch Streaming, 3G-324M mobile video-conferencing and more. Additionally, IMTC will held a Telepresence Interoperability workshop and kick-off meeting. The event is open to all IMTC members and non-members by invitation only. Additional information can be found at the registration site.

Update, the event is postponed to June 14-18:

” Dear Colleagues,

It is not an easy decision to make, but considering that the world just started very gradual recovery from the ash cloud travel disruption, IMTC SuperOp! Planning Committee decided that it will be reasonable and prudent to postpone the testing event until June 14-18. We truly believe that this is the best decision on behalf of all participants, as it will ensure that everybody will be able to safely get in and out of the event and will be able to focus on the testing and not on the travel headaches during the event. Additionally, we see this as an opportunity to may be bring additional companies to the event, especially those who couldn’t attend next week.

With this, there is a number of items to be taken care of:

  1. To simplify the logistics, all attendees will be automatically rebooked with the hotel according to the new event dates (June 14 – 18). For example, for someone who was supposed to arrive on Sunday, April 25th, the new arrival date with the hotel will be June 13. Of course the changes can be made as necessary by individual participants.
  2. We are working on making the arrangements with the hotel to securely store all of the shipped equipment at no charge. Update will be provided on this later on.
  3. We would like to encourage everyone to make new travel arrangements as soon as possible to ensure proper flights will be available.

Once again, we believe that this is the best decision for all the participants and IMTC members under current circumstances and we apologize for any inconvenience.

With best regards,

IMTC SuperOp! Planning Committee ”

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About the writer: Anatoli Levine
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H.323 versus SIP: An (un)objective Comparison

September 18, 2007 By Kfir Pravda 3 Comments

By Tsahi Levent-Levi

I came across an interesting comparison between H.323 and SIP in a Cisco related blog. They make a pretty good technical analysis, but the comparison lacks in its completeness.

Both H.323 and SIP are used today for VoIP, and they are considered interchangeable solutions. The comparison made covers the following issues:

  • Philosophy – H.323 does calls, SIP does sessions
  • Reliability – H.323 reliable by design, SIP by responsible user agents
  • Message Definition – H.323 uses ASN.1, SIP uses ABNF
  • Message Encoding – H.323 is binary, SIP is mostly textual
  • Media Transport – both use RTP/RTCP and SRTP
  • Extensibility – H.323 extensible by design, SIP breaks interoperability with extensibility
  • Scalability – H.323 scalable by design, SIP by implementation or by additional IETF standards
  • Addressing – H.323 supports multiple addressing schemes, SIP has only URIs
  • Billing – H.323 has billing by design, SIP by implementation

And the list goes on to other issues. It seems strange to me that in all, H.323 either excels or does as good as SIP. This being the case, why does every new developer looking for SIP?

I have been working with H.323 and SIP for several years now, and I can say that both have their advantages and both are broken in some places. H.323 is a lot better today in issues of interoperability – a lot of it can be easily attributed to the IMTC’s work in this area. I also have a warm place in my heart for this particular protocol – I have been working and dealing with it for many years. That said, the comparison above lacks two main points:

IMS

The 3GPP’s next generation network, which has been adopted by the Tispan and CableLabs (making it the de-facto network in the world in the future). This happened as the 3GPP added interfaces scenarios and call flows to SIP, giving more advantages to it.

H.323 is not part of IMS and is irrelevant for IMS.

SIP is at the core of IMS.

Market

H.323 is dominant today and has large deployments around the world. It is a lot better where it comes to video conferencing, and can be found a lot more in the enterprise.

SIP is the protocol of choice for most developers today – it is quite strong in the consumer and service provider markets. If you are a company about to develop a communication product, you will probably be selecting SIP. It is not as good for video conferencing, but it is getting there.

Services

There is another parameter that is important, and that is what services are part of the protocol and what new services can be offered easily?

H.323 focuses on multimedia calls in all of their flavors. Voice only, video, data collaboration, conferences and a rich set of telephony services.

SIP doesn’t seem to focus on anything in particular. You can use sessions to make calls with it (voice, video – whatever), you use it for presence and instant messaging, and you can use it for a large array of additional services as well.

That said, these services can be added to H.323 as well – this statement would be true to trying to add new services to SS7 though…

Now, if you opened a company now, which protocol would you decide use? What would be your decision looking only on technical aspects, and what would it be looking only on market aspects?

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About the writer: Kfir Pravda
Filed Under: IMS, Interoperability, SIP, Technology insight Tagged With: , , , ,