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ISDN Videoconferencing |
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The Basics Explained
Sometimes it's not possible or even practical to have a personal meeting with two or a group of people. Sometimes a telephone conversation or conference call is adequate. Many times an email exchange will be more than adequate. ISDN videoconferencing adds another possible alternative. You can consider ISDN videoconferencing when:
- A live conversation is needed
- Visual information is an important component of the conversation
- The parties of the conversation can't physically come to the same location
- The expense or time of travel is a consideration
ISDN videoconferencing uses telecommunications of audio and video to bring people at different sites together for a meeting usually in the same room. This can be just a simple conversation between two people in private offices, usually termed as a point-to-point conference, or it may involve several sites, referred to as a multi-point conference, with more than one person in large rooms at different sites. Besides the audio and visual transmission of people, video conferencing can be used to share documents, computer-displayed information, and whiteboards as well. Improvements are being made in collaborative tools that allow people at different sites to electronically manipulate a common document or computer application according to their need.
ISDN videoconferencing is mistaken for an outdated technology in the view of the fast developing broadband technology. ISDN videoconferencing in fact, a very versatile and fast network technology that has been around before the Internet broadband technology was thought of. Maybe this is why ISDN videoconferencing is looked down upon as an outdated technology. ISDN videoconferencing might work out to be a little costlier than broadband but it has its advantages.
IEEE standards guide the development of ISDN videoconferencing. The H.320 standard describes how ISDN videoconferencing operates over ordinary telephone circuits. This is the standard that specifies how a single wire or even an optical fiber can carry voice, digital network services, and video. An ISDN videoconferencing circuit has more bandwidth than a regular analog telephone circuit. The H.323 describes how ISDN videoconferencing operates over the Internet (TCP/IP or just IP). Multipoint Conferencing Units handle the traffic flow in multi-point ISDN videoconferencing and typically include gateway capabilities to bridge H.320 and H.323 sites in a conference.
The quality of ISDN videoconferencing primarily depends on the characteristics of the circuit between the conferencing sites. In the ISDN videoconferencing world a high-quality conference means that for excellent audio and video one need about 768 KiloBits/Second of bandwidth. Now one has to decide if it is going to be ISDN videoconferencing or IP based broadband video conferencing. If you have a choice of having an ISDN versus an IP connection with the off-campus site, you really have two issues to consider, the quality and cost of the ISDN videoconferencing facility. In many cases, there will be additional charges for ISDN videoconferencing. In general, there are no additional charges for IP video conferencing. You will get consistent quality with an ISDN connection, but over the
internet commodity
you do not have guaranteed bandwidth. So make sure to do a test video conference well before the actual session to validate your choice.
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