Circles of Life and Interoperability

Tables are set (we call them booth, but they are simply two tables put together in L-shape), the network and power cables being laid down. Equipment on the racks is humming away:

IMTC’s annual flagship interoperability testing event, called SuperOp!, is starting on Monday, May 16th.

It will be 15th SuperOp! – as IMTC had being working since 1993 on ensuring interoperability of standards-based  communication technologies and devices. There had being numerous interoperability testing events done by individual activity groups – I would roughly estimate that total number of events might be closer to 150 – engineers, competitors, getting together to ensure that competition and marketing aside, our technology is cohesive and working together – in real life.

Everything runs in circles in this life. Okay, it is actually a spiral, but when you are in it, it looks like circle. We became a full circle with the location of the event – Three out of four biggest and most successful IMTC SuperOp! events took place in Hawaii – 1998, 1999, 2001 ( 2000 event was in Nice). All the way until 2006, IMTC SuperOp! events were conducted in September ( then shifted into April/May time frame). The event in year 2001 was taking place September 10-14… I still remember being awaken at 3:30 AM on Tuesday, September 11, with an unfathomable news of World Trade Center bombing. So when we decided that we are going to Hawaii for 2011 event, whole planning cycle had being a bit surreal, in anticipation of waking up and finding out that it was just a dream. But – we are here. It is a different island (we are on Big Island now), but still a Hilton hotel is hosting the event – Hilton Waikoloa Village. Things do run in circles.

Our view here at Kona

Until 2001, H.323 protocol was the main focus of IMTC. At the beginning 2001, a small group of companies approached IMTC and said “streaming video is important, and it will be big, and it should be interoperable”. SuperOp! 2001 was first ever event to test Packet Switch Streaming technologies – and yes, it became big and continues to be one of the main activities of IMTC.

Everything runs in circles. SuperOp! 2011 will be first ever event for Voice over LTE testing over live LTE network (courtesy of our sponsor, Huawei). SuperOp! 2011 will be first ever event for testing TIP – Telepresence Interoperability Protocol. SuperOp! 2011 will be first ever IMTC event for Huawei, Acme Packet, Teliris, Magor, BlueJeans. Overall, there will be more engineers attending this SuperOp! 2011 than SuperOp! 2010.

Video communications and all –IP communications are marching forward with ever-increasing speed. Video communication became regular part of our daily lives. IP pipe, ubiquitously available in 4G mobile networks, promises to further simplify our daily communication and allow delivering of the new services. For more than 15 years, IMTC had being pushing both Video and ubiquitous all-IP communication to become a simple reality, based on proven interoperability – and the work is going to continue. And if you are not participating yet, it is time to be the part of the circle of Interoperability – the first ever.

 

About the writer: Anatoli Levine

IMTC SuperOp! 2010 – Interoperability. Evolving

And so another busy week became a history. IMTC SuperOp!, annual industry flagship interoperability testing event, brought together more than 50 engineers from 14 companies from around the world in a small town of Jesi in Italy, to continue enhancing interoperability of multimedia communications products.

SuperOp Testings

Of course you can not drive forward by constantly looking into a rearview mirror. Not looking in to that mirror at all is also dangerous ( especially for those who likes to drive fast :) ).
Reflecting on the past, it is easy to see how much the level of interoperability improved and evolved. Decade ago, an hour long testing time slot was spent on properly registering with the server, and then may be making one successful simple call (or not). Video did look decent on a small screen ( with huge piece of hardware behind it to make it work).
The term “HD Video” was not even coined yes. And the term “telepresence” was unheard of, at least in the practical terms. SuperConnect, a culmination point of a week-long testing, which was connecting all devices passed the preliminary testing, would take more than half a day to achieve.
Fast forward 10 years. To cut the chase as anyone in the industry can figure out the particulars, the 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.

Inter-operable Indeed!

Can we now gleefully rest on laurels and declare “mission accomplished”? You guessed it right, the simple two letter answer is “no”. Video communication is only starting to become personal and getting into homes. Mobile video communication is still largely non-existent, and both personal and mobile communication being extremely clustered (read: uninteroperable) as the very least. We are starting (only now) to define telepresence standards which will later on lead to the interoperable implementations. The work just started in various IMTC Activity Groups on other important communication technologies, such as VoLTE and Live Streaming over HTTP. All in all, there is a lot of exciting work ahead of us on making the world better connected (and, therefore, smaller) place – so come on over and will see you all next year at IMTC SuperOp! 2011!
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About the writer: Anatoli Levine

Presentation – Traffic Emulation for Telepresence Interoperability testing

Shenick Network Systems is a maker of network performance monitoring systems.
In the IMTC SuperOP 2010 event, Mark Lambe talked about Traffic Emulation in, as a part of the interoperability testing process for Telepresence systems.
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About the writer: IMTC

Testing IMS Video Sharing in the IMTC's SuperOp!

By Kristofer Jarl

Hello friends.

I’m now facing a difficult task. I have to write enough material about our tests during SuperOp! 2007 to make this post interesting, and at the same time I have to keep the actual result and outcome secret, due to disclosure agreements. Let’s see how I do.

First of all, there was no scheduled test time dedicated to CSI (or VideoShare) during SuperOp! 2007. The testing we did was outside ordinary schedule. But still, we received lots of help from the fine people arranging this event, setting up environments, provisioning SIMs and so on. Thanks to everyone who helped out.

After having tested connectivity and server environments during Thursday evening, the actual testing began early Friday morning. A few hours later, we were forced to cut off, since networks were going down and plugs were being pulled. Nevertheless, we are happy with the outcome. We have tested according to the test specification, and we have some issues that should be addressed. Video has been sent, and video has been received.

Saturday morning we had our first F2F meeting. Finally. Due to some last minute changes, only five companies were represented. But we are still satisfied, we now have momentum. Several details were discussed regarding the test document, and we started planning a new test activity sometime during August/September. This time it will be an isolated CSI test activity. We will focus solely on the services that the group is involved in. Sweden or Israel seem to be hot candidates. Hope to see you all there!

All in all, it’s great to see the recognition we are gaining, after all our hard work. If we keep going like this, we are on our way to success. New companies are joining the group, and our liasons are welcomed by everyone. Hopefully, more test events will be reality soon, and we are also glancing at other features similar to CSI that we would like to bring into our group. Please join, you could be in for something good!

Take care!

Kristofer Jarl
Sony Ericsson Mobile Communication

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About the writer: Kfir Pravda

It’s always the same – Standards, Interoperability and Expertise

By Anatoli Levine

I’m very excited to be the first to welcome you to the IMTC Blog! As a popular saying goes, it is hard to teach old dogs the new tricks. IMTC is 14 years old, so in the terms of age technology, it is quite an honorable age. A lot of young engineers today might even question the sheer existence of the standards IMTC was all about. However, IMTC as an organization is evolving, and we do “learn new tricks” and reinvent ourselves. We moved from H.320 to H.323, then to Packet Switched, SIP and 3G Mobile Video. We continue evolving further to IMS and Content Delivery.

IMTC managed to build an incredibly valuable collection of standardization-related documents for such technologies like JPEG (we call this collection a Historical Archive). While organization evolved, the core things IMTC is all about stayed the same – standards, interoperability and expertise.

IMTC always advocated multimedia communications technologies based on open standards. The focus of the IMTC work is Real Life Interoperability. With numerous Interoperability testing events, including the flagship annual SuperOp! event, IMTC is well known in the industry as leading authority on interoperability testing. And with IMTC Forums, we always bring together world experts in multimedia communications and standards development. And this combination of expertise and leadership makes me believe in exciting future prospects of IMTC.

I do like science fiction a lot. While driving today to work, I was thinking about predictions made in the books about the ways we will communicate. And one thing did strike me is that almost everything which was dreamed of, except may be “Beam me up, Scotty”, is the reality today. We can see and hear each other any time any place, we always know our exact location, our cars can park themselves…if you are a science fiction writer, what kind of communication technologies will you envision? Well, I’m sure, whatever we will come up with, IMTC will be around to make sure it is interoperable and to promote it.

And while the new technologies are being invented, IMTC is continuing on its current way, and inviting you to join in. Next week at VON in San Jose, IMTC puts together a panel of experts who will discuss the role of standards in the today’s communications world. More info is available here: http://www.von.com/schedule_gcs31168946047.html

Then in April, IMTC members will get together for annual SuperOp! 2007 event ( April 23-27, in Jesi, Italy), to test all the latest developments in SIP, IMS, 3G-324M, Packet Switched and other technologies. And of course we have more events planned throughout 2007 and beyond. Bottom line is very simple – if your company is not a member of IMTC yet, make it high priority to join IMTC and help shaping the future of multimedia communications!

Have a great interoperable communications day!

About the writer: Kfir Pravda