No “One Internet”, No One Video Conferencing Experience

By Sagee Ben-Zedeff

Categories: Video Conferencing

October 27th, 2009

Tsahi recently wrote a guest post over at NoJitter (RESPECT!) talking about Net Neutrality and the “One Internet”. Tsahi was talking about the Internet and Internet services in general, and I want to talk about Video Conferencing.

Here’s what Tsahi wrote:

There are two areas where net neutrality falls apart and causes real problems for users:

1. Access to the Internet.
2. Services over the Internet.

It doesn’t take an expert to see that these are the same problems that video conferencing users are/will be facing, with all due respect to the “One Internet” concept, and I will explain.

Access to the Internet

I am a very big supporter of the “always connected” concept, and have written here before that users should have access to the network and to the service from anywhere, using any device they would like.

Anywhere, in tech terms, means either using a mobile network (usually 3G) or a WiFi connection. As Tsahi explained, connecting to the Internet using either is extremely different than connecting from home or from the office:

The problem is the huge difference between access technologies to the internet. To list a few:

• Download/Upload speeds may be flaky, depending on location and amount of other access points/cells around.
• Packet losses are a fact of life and latencies are higher than that of direct (fiber or ADSL) connections.

And if there is no “One Internet” in terms of Internet access, one cannot really talk about “The Video Conferencing Experience”. It’s a totally different experience when you’re connected at the office, at your home, at the local coffee shop or on the go. With different speeds and different network QoS, it’s really hard to talk about one experience.

Video Calling Over the Internet

Tsahi defined “Net Neutrality” very well: all packets are born equal, and none should be prioritized. While this sounds nice, in the video coding world this not only doesn’t make sense, but is terribly wrong, and may harm the experience dramatically.

Intra frame packets are more important than Inter frame packets. Base layer packets are more important than higher layer packets. Priorities should be given (and actually are given, by Media-Aware Network Elements, or MANEs) accordingly. In other words, for efficient and effective video coding and transport over the Internet, the “net” should not be neutral at all.

Where the Internet is neutral, video quality suffers. And so again there is no “one experience” for video conferencing – it depends on the service configuration. Are you using dedicated infrastructure? Are you leasing MPLS lines? Are you working over a “video-only network”? If so, then it won’t come as a surprise to you that, like Tsahi, I don’t believe in the “One Internet” dream.

So next time you talk about “the video conferencing experience”, you better define that experience well. First discuss the access and network parameters, then the service definitions, and only then will you be able to discuss the quality of that experience.