Archive for 2008
Video based services are becoming a standard means of communication for both enterprises and service providers; however, video conferencing, surveillance and other video-based services are bandwidth hogs, making video quality a real issue when deploying them over live networks. Video quality is affected by a wide range of network parameters: bit rate, frame rate, packet losses, jitter, etc. Each can contribute to the reduction of the user’s quality of experience. As enterprises and service providers struggle to deploy video communication
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | August 7th, 2008 | Filed under Technology
Last month I asked the question do communication protocols need to be Swiss Army Knives or penknives. I also asked the same question in LinkedIn Answers. The (almost) unanimous answer I got was penknives. The best part of it was actually getting two great acronyms to use for that do-it-all protocol: Steve Michelson suggested GPPTDE: General Purpose Protocol That Does Everything Cedric Mauvielle suggested SAKF: Swiss Army Knife Protocol Cedric believes a SAKF (or a GPPTDE)
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | August 4th, 2008 | Filed under Protocol stacks
There is no such thing as Unified Communications or Social Media. For that matter, Web 2.0 and Phone 2.0 are also non-existent. And there’s no Presence in TelePresence either. For the last decade, I’ve been a player in these worlds, working on either development or marketing of related building blocks for this industry. During that time, only three things have changed: There’s a lot more bandwidth waiting to be used There’s a lot more processing power There’s more acceptance
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | July 31st, 2008 | Filed under Technology
Interesting times in the mobile handsets arena. VisionMobile maps the new centers of gravity in this industry. I believe competition will lag behind Apple’s iPhone in their next release as well as copycatting its ideas and designs. Talking about the iPhone - I am thinking of starting a petition to ban iPhone from Google Alerts for 3G video. For the past two weeks I am getting nothing from that service besides iPhone jailbreaks and teardowns. Growing bandwidth and increasing CPU power will change television as we know it. It will also speed up the use of video telephony adoption and quality and this fits well with the trend of multi-core diversification I have written about. You can add to this TiVo’s two new deals with YouTube and Amazon - it’s only the beginning. HD is seen by some as the true promise of VoIP - this is certainly different than the Unified Communications pitch. What happens when you don’t have enough bandwidth though?
By Tsahi Levent-Levi | July 28th, 2008 | Filed under Around the net
There’s no presence in TelePresence. And you know what? There’s also no “unified” or “communication” in UC (Unified Communication). These are just new buzzwords in VoIP town. They are there to replace “video conferencing” and “convergence.” Besides the fact that they are more of the same (maybe better), there’s nothing new under the sun. TelePresence TelePresence is simply better video conferencing. It has higher resolutions (1080p instead of 720p, or CIF if you refer to legacy systems), higher bitrates and
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | July 24th, 2008 | Filed under Technology
You can do everything with SIP: Voice over IP, video telephony, presence, instant messaging, SMS, MMS and much more. Sometimes it feels like SIP is a protocol invented by a salesman: “Oh, you are looking for a solution that starts the microwave when you get to your driveway after a long day? Sure we have it - SIP!”Last week I wrote about XMPP versus SIMPLE, where both are used for presence and SIMPLE and utilize SIP for its transport. A
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | July 21st, 2008 | Filed under Protocol stacks, Standardization
Presence is always positioned as the key to unified communications (UC) - at the very heart of UC is the ability to discern the current status of people and resources. Which protocol will be the one used to power Presence? SIMPLE or XMPP? XMPP XMPP stands for “Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol”. It is a streaming based protocol that routes XML messages between entities. It is mainly used for presence and instant messaging although other uses for it exist
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | July 17th, 2008 | Filed under Standardization
In case you haven’t noticed, multi-core processing is happening. We’ve already covered multi-core aspects that relate both to servers and clients. For clients, I’ve previously focused on video communications, but there is another aspect on the client side that is important to note - for clients, multi-core is a game of diversification, not only multiplication. Multi-core, as previously discussed and as promoted today to the mass market, is all about multiplication. Take a general purpose CPU and multiply it
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | July 14th, 2008 | Filed under Clients
Everything today is High Definition (HD). Whether you’re talking about televisions, projectors, video conferencing or even voice calls - the latest and greatest is high-definition capable. That said, high definition is really complex to deal with, not just in terms of bandwidth requirements, but in terms of processing power - especially if we’re dealing with visual communications. The challenge Have you ever tried watching a movie encoded in high definition format on your laptop? Assuming you have a single
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | July 10th, 2008 | Filed under Technology
Now that Nokia’s has announced their purchase of Symbian and their attempt to open source it, it is time to try and see how the market of operating systems looks like today - especially with regards to what is going to happen to Windows Mobile. As Michael Mace puts it rather nicely - it’s the end of a dream: “No matter how it works out in the long run, the purchase of Symbian by Nokia marks the end of a
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | July 7th, 2008 | Filed under Clients, Technology
