Internet video conferencing allows remotely located people to communicate with each other conveniently, effectively and inexpensively. Though highly developed today, this solution faced several hurdles before it reached a stage when it could be deployed in the education, legal, media, medical and corporate sector. The first visual communication system was used in 1940s in German Reich Post Office Network, where two cameras recorded videos and coax cables transferred data.
In the early 70s, AT&T was the first company to develop visual global conferencing services for the masses. However, its efforts were marred by inefficient video compression technologies resulting in blurred videos. An ordinary telephony network was used to transmit slow-scan videos, but the prevalent 6Mbps bit rate and 1Mhz bandwidth rendered it useless for practical implementation. As technology developed in 1980s, compression techniques also improved and the size of the videos reduced considerably. By mid-1990s, video event conferencing was more feasible, though poor picture quality was still a deterrent.
By that time, ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) was used to host visual managed conferencing calls. ISDN is a protocol suite that digitises voice, video and data, so that it can be transferred over a telephone line. Though it had low initial and monthly costs and supported high speed video calls, it had many demerits that did not allow visual communication across remote locations to be feasible. This protocol was unreliable, had high cost of usage, and required expensive ISDN switching equipment for enterprise-grade implementation. Further, individual video event conferencing device had to be ISDN-enabled, leading to increasing costs of organising a video call.
Fortunately, the internet also developed rapidly during this time, and video calls could be made over the Local Area Network (LAN) and Wide Area Network (WAN), allowing companies to avail global conferencing services. These IP-enabled video systems tapped into the bandwidth of the company's internet connection to send data. This way, organisations could conduct videos without the disadvantages brought by ISDN protocol. However, ISDN is still used by many organisations, even though most companies in India prefer IP-enabled video conferencing solutions, since high speed internet connections deliver better video quality.
In due course, organisations that have adopted IP networks as the preferred protocol can carry out India video conferencing on the same Internet connection. As higher bandwidth will be required to deliver best performance, high speed internet connections will be best suited for visual communication over large distances. Internet video conferencing can now deliver high quality video without lag, loss of data and network errors. Even high definition (HD) videos can be broadcasted over the Internet without any latency, allowing interactive communication between an indefinite number of participants (multipoint video India conference call).
Presently, video managed conferencing solutions are available on two systems - dedicated systems and desktop systems. Dedicated system comprises a console that is equipped with a HD level remote controlled video camera, control computer and hardware-based coder-decoder (codec). On the other hand, desktop systems used for internet-based visual communication are hardware boards and other such add-ons, which enable ordinary computers to send data via H.323 standards.
Mark Voucher is an experienced writer having more than 10 years of experience in writing articles on various topics such as Internet video conferencing, global conferencing services and event conferencing etc.
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