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Corporate.Net
H.323: Videoconferencing Approaches The Millennium

By Jeff Newman with Dave Brown Alexander Graham Bell's first telephone call, "Watson, come here. I need you," didn't knock the world off its axis, but his invention did. The resulting telephone company, bearing his name, years later strove to reinvent the "picture phone," but failed because transmission costs were astronomical, picture quality was lousy and multivendor standards were not yet considered. Not until this year have all these factors been addressed with the introduction of H.323-based videoconferencing. Although few H.323-compliant products are available, more are sure to appear next year--when DVC (desktop videoconferencing) is expected to take off.

H.320 has been the long-time standard for videoconferencing. It was designed primarily for ISDN because that technology is the lowest-common denominator for fast and reliable audio/video communication. Unfortunately, most people do not have ISDN, and practically no corporate users have ISDN to their desktops. This rules out H.320 systems for most home users and corporate office users. Corporations, however, want to use videoconferencing to reduce travel and communication expenses, to increase productivity and to develop better client and customer relationships.

To view the Report card.
In and between Network Computing's San Mateo, Calif., and University of Wisconsin labs, we tested the first four H.323 products that have been brought to market: PictureTel Corp.'s LiveLAN 3.0, Intel Corp.'s Business Video Conferencing System 3.0 (BVS), Microsoft Corp.'s NetMeeting 2.0 and White Pine Software's CU-SeeMe 3.1b with MeetingPoint server.

We found some of the vendors were better at serving different communities--corporate and no ncorporate. PictureTel's LiveLAN 3.0 and Intel's Business Video Conferencing System 3.0 proved to be the best for corporate use, running neck and neck in terms of performance, picture and audio quality and reliability.

The second class of products includes Microsoft NetMeeting 2.0 and White Pine's CU-SeeMe 3.1b with MeetingPoint conference software (in beta), which are well-suited to the noncorporate Internet user in terms of price and audio and video quality. The early releases of these products do not have the quality of audio and video required in most business organizations. Of these two, NetMeeting came out on top in terms of audio and video quality, collaboration features and price (the software is free).

We were pleasantly surprised with the interoperability of these products and with their overall performance. We experienced few problems in getting every combination of these products to connect and to exchange video, audio and T.120 standard data collaboration. Finally, despite the quality of these products, our testing revealed that all fight an uphill battle with network latency (See "A Big Hurdle: Network Latency," page 108).

PictureTel Corp. LiveLAN 3.0
PictureTel has been known for its quality audio and video--and for the high price of its products. Since the early days of videoconferencing (room or desktop), the company has insisted on quality as the No. 1 goal and has delivered nothing less. LiveLAN 3.0's strengths lie in its high-quality audio and video; we found it to be the best of the bunch. In addition, the collaboration features offered in this package are exceptional and compared equally to those in Microsoft's NetMeeting.

The only problem was LiveLAN's lack of dynamic bandwidth negotiation when establishing conferences with H.323 clients from the other vendors. LiveLAN had a tendency to force its bandwidth on the other peer, making it a bit unfriendly to sensitive clients. This was especially tru e across WAN connections, where network latency can amplify existing connection problems.

To download an Adobe Acrobat .pdf format version of the H.323 Videoconferencing System features charts, click here.