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SuperOP 2011 Event & TIP

March 6, 2011 By IMTC Leave a Comment

IMTC SuperOp! 2011, premier annual Interoperability Testing event, will take place in Kona, Hawaii, during the week of May 16-20.
During the event, IMTC members will get together to test various IP Video communications systems and technologies ranging from SIP and H.323 to VoLTE and IMS. During this event, Telepresence Interoperability Protocol (TIP) implementations will be tested for the first time ever.

Registration is open at http://www.regonline.com/superopkona

IMTC official announcement can be found here (PDF).

About the writer: IMTC
Filed Under: Events, Industry News, Interoperability, Telepresence, TIP, Unified Communication Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

CTO Technology Session – Interoperability & UC Event

February 15, 2011 By IMTC 1 Comment

Register Here

IMTC has scheduled its first ever CTO Technology Session on March 8-9, 2011 at the AT&T Offices in Middletown, New Jersey. This is a forward looking session that will provide you will analyst information of the key technologies, markets and growth rates for UC, Video and Collaboration solutions. It is also intended, that the group will look at how all these technologies come together with a seamless, interoperable solution.

Historically IMTC has been at the center of communication industry technology changes as noted by our work with H.323, H.264, SIP Parity, IMS, T120, H.320 and PSS, 3G-324M, and other profiles for standard telephony protocols. Communications industry is changing rapidly, and IMTC is helping its members to embrace the change.

In addition to Keynote Speakers from AT&T, Cisco and Polycom, below is a list of confirmed speakers:

Confirmed Speakers:

  • Ronald Gruia, Principal Analyst ~ Frost & Sullivan
  • Phil Karcher, Principal Analyst ~ Forrester Research
  • Ginger Arnold, Manager, LMAC IT Infrastructure & Operations ~ Liberty Mutual
  • Russ Cary, Senior IT Manager ~ SAS Global Communications Services
  • Phil Edholm, VP Technology Strategy & Innovation ~ Avaya
  • Casey King, CTO ~ LifeSize  Communications

The IMTC is pleased to invite all IMTC member companies to this FREE event.  We’ll strive to provide you with information and answers to the following questions:

1. What is the current state of the communications industry?

2. What defines video communications today (Skype, Google, Apple, H.323 and SIP) and how it plays into Unified Communications?

3. How do these various video and unified communication solutions come together into a seamless cloud or enterprise implementation?

4. Where should your company spend its resources in order to solve our customers key pain points?

5. What are the key enterprise customer use cases?

6. Where do telepresence solutions fit?

7. What do I need to know about SVC? How does it impact the above?

8. What are the key dependencies impeding interoperability between equipment, network and cloud services?

9. What is the role of devices such as tablets and smart phones in the unified communication mix and specifically with video communications and how do they affect enterprise implementations?

Together with our member companies, the IMTC would like to build a roadmap of key industry technology initiatives to be addressed in order for the seamless communications cloud to work.

This IMTC event is closed to only IMTC member companies. You can send as many representatives from a member company as you like, however we encourage you to invite senior product management and CTO types of individuals.

Venue:

AT&T Offices
200 Laurel Avenue South
Middletown, New Jersey 07748

Closest Airport:

EWR (Newark)

Nearby Hotels:

http://www.research.att.com/evergreen/about_us/middletown_hotels.html

Register Here:
http://www.regonline.com/imtcctoroundtable

About the writer: IMTC
Filed Under: Events, IMTC News, Interoperability, Technology insight, Telepresence, Unified Communication Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

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: , , , , ,

The Technology Behind iPhone 4 FaceTime Protocol – Standards & Apple

June 9, 2010 By Anatoli Levine 34 Comments

Apple announcement of FaceTime, their new video telephony solution, included various standards: H.264, AAC, SIP, STUN, TURN, ICE, RTP, and SRTP. If this is the case, it would offer great start for interoperability, as the very same standards are widely used by the modern video communications solutions by majority of the vendors.

Here’s a short explanation on the role of each standard:

H.264 – one of most prominent video compression standards in use today. Used by every major and minor video communications solution today, from the mobile video to desktop to room system to Telepresence system. Has AVC (advanced video coding) and SVC (scalable video coding) profiles – AVC profile is what is widely used and interoperable today, while SVC profile holds great promise once interoperability will be established. Already used on the iPhone and other i-devices.
AAC – advanced audio coding standard. Widely used today in audio and video communications and has established interoperability. Used by iPhone and other i-devices.
SIP – Session Initiation Protocol – de-facto standard of IP Communications solutions, including both Voice and Video communications. Used by majority of video conferencing vendors, such as Cisco, Tandberg, Polycom, RADVISION and more. Also one of the core standards in 3GPP IMS ( IP Multimedia Subsystems) communications.. Highly interoperable, however, lacking dedicated definitions for IP Video Call Control – IMTC SIP Parity Activity group developed set of best common practices and use cases to improve interoperability of SIP –based video communications.
STUN, TURN and ICE – typically used together to support Firewall and NAT traversal functionality. STUN ( Session Traversal Utilities for NAT) allows to map internal IP addressed behind the NAT to the external IP addresses. TURN (Traversal Using Relay NAT) is used in rare cases where STUN doesn’t provide a solution. ICE (Interactive Connectivity Establishment) is used as an umbrella standard utilizing STUN, TURN, uPnP and others in order to find possible way to transfer the NAT and Firewall.
RTP, which stands for Real-time Transport Protocol, is used in Voice and Video over IP implementations to carry over real-time media and collecting of the statistics, such as jitter and latency, which in turn allows to implement better quality solutions. Today used by absolute majority IP voice and video vendors.
SRTP – Secure RTP, profile for secure RTP communication which supports encryption, message authentication and integrity. Widely used in both IP Video and Voice implementations.

We are looking froward for further implementations of this new technology. Things are getting very interesting in visual communication products.

—
More about Facetime:

  • Facetime Technical Analysis on packetstan.com - Part 1(TCP, UDP, AKAMI, STUN, SIP), Part 2 (Sip & Data Streams), Part 3 (Call Connection Initialization).
About the writer: Anatoli Levine
Filed Under: Interoperability, Technology insight 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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