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Videoconferencing 2000: H.323's Year?
September 6, 1999 |
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How We Tested... Videoconferencing With H.323 MCUs Our tests of H.323 multipoint conference units focused on a variety of endpoints--some on the same LAN as the multipoint conferencing units (MCUs), and others on a long-distance Internet connection. For these tests, we moved from our usual setting at the University of Wisconsin to the nearby Pyle Center, a state-of-the-art conference management facility operated by UW-Extension's Instructional Communications System (ICS). Currently using H.320 conference bridging equipment, ICS is planning an upgrade that will add H.323 MCUs and gatekeepers. We linked over the Internet to the Communications Systems Center in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. Both universities have excellent OC-3 connections over most of the route, and the Internet link performed very well. Ping-tested delays were on the order of 60 to 90 ms. The ICS LAN also performed well. We tested on minimally loaded LAN segments so no variability could be attributed to unrelated data traffic. We investigated various options for adding legacy H.320 systems to H.323 conferences via gateways by including a RadVision LIU-323 packaged as a Madge LVG EN LAN Video Gateway. (See "Our Test Setup" on page 84.) We did not have the facilities in our lab environment to set up large interactive conferences, or challenge the performance claims of the Windows NT-based server-oriented manufacturers. For the conferences we set up, picture quality and frame rates appeared to be unaffected by the insertion of MCU systems.
The big story to emerge from our tests turned out to be interoperability. The perplexing combination of conference settings and endpoint algorithm choices is the Achilles' heel that still inhibits wide-scale deployment of H.323. We focused on setting up a variety of H.323 endpoints and testing the most interesting combinations. For a complete discussion of these findings, go to www.networkcomputing.com/1018/1018f3side3.html.
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