The challenge of Video Conference

Oh back in 2001 I wrote a Master Thesis on the Challenge of Video Conference . Now this paper was inspire by the type of work I did in 90's. Lately I have seen a lot of people downloading this paper and I assume it was students. Now the paper is full of politics and technical observations regarding Video Conference.

A number of years previous to that paper I was running an IT department for a major software company in the US. In the Canadian division we had 5 locations of which two where used for development. At that time we used Frame Relay to connect the two offices together. The offices were hundreds of kilometres apart. What I did was to setup using Net meeting a video conference between both locations. These were simple cameras at that time and each conference room in each city had a work station that would broadcast a Net meeting. So if you can image walking into a room and see your staff on the video it was like talking to Max Headroom.

Since we had the luxury of having two dedicated meeting rooms with video conferencing, I noticed that my staff would hang out in these two rooms all day. They would bring in there laptops and talk between cities as if they were talking between two people.

The synergy that this created was the feeling of having one team. As the company expanded a second location was added and I add the video conference to a fairly large server room. Again my staff took to it and felt like having a video conference 8 hours a day 5 days week was starting to be a good thing. Friendships started to form and I really thought that this was the wave of the future. I thought that everyone was doing this in there companies. First yes people are having video conference but not 8 hours a day. Second now with bandwidth constrains this would be extremely costly today.

Now the connection between the sites was limited to bandwidth and because we only used the bandwidth for very large file transfer off hours and for email and surfing we utilized the bandwidth for communication.

Since that time I have worked in a number of different location and nobody had used video conference as room extension. Most video conferences are either for only short conversations or meetings. Most people who never even dream of having video conference call 5 days a week i.e. always on.

Now my youngest son had a video camera on his PC and from time to time he has video call with his friends as they play an on line game. What I noticed is that they too use the room as extension to the other person house. The bandwidth is now compressed and video and voice is very good.

Ok so you probably at this time asking what this has to do with wireless Mesh, well, I don't know. Ok I do know. Many Wireless Mesh Companies provide cameras to their Wireless Mesh maybe for security or webcast or what ever. It's an extension of the area they covering. Most of the time it is boring and nothing to see other than a bird flying towards the camera. These cameras are on for 24 hours, 7 days a week 365 days a week. That is impressive. The cost to run this minor. Today in Canada a few cell phone companies are providing video conference through their client cell phone. This too is impressive but costly. Most people would not have a conference call on the cell phone for over 5 minutes. It would be cost prohibitive.

Can Video Conference run on a Mesh 24-7? You bet. Can you now imagine the social implication of have a permanent Video Conference running on a wireless mesh? Awesome.

Can you imagine taking a flat panel TV and adding a video conference component and living it on so that you can watch you buddy from his house? That was outrageous but Extreme Video Conferencing is coming to a mesh near you.