Remember the TV advert for an airline, where the guy who flies halfway round the world to look his potential customer in the eye clinches the deal, scoring over the chump who can’t be bothered and just makes a telephone call? Well, imagine its equivalent in a few years’ time: a CO2-fuelled desert creeps up from the home counties, while planes are downed by a new variant of plastic explosive which can be moulded into any object and triggered by pouring a cup of water over it. As the last cow in Yorkshire keels over in Huddersfield and the first commercial flight of the Airbus A380 crashes into the Atlantic, the voiceover extols the virtues of video conferencing…
OK, that’s one advert that will never be made and the video conferencing vendors don’t need to spell things out that loudly. In fact, in my opinion it would be better if they didn’t spell out these links at all and concentrated on just getting the technology to work properly.
IP telephony, the blind cousin of video conferencing, is moving towards widespread acceptance. But most of the IP telephony calls I’ve received have been easily detectable. On some the volume has been so low that I’ve wondered if mice have put on a spurt of evolution and started to talk, while others have sounded as if comedian Norman Collier (of the intermittently working microphone voice) was on the end of the line. Others have sounded, in the immortal words of Dell Boy Trotter, like I had “a crossed line with the Krankies”.
Perhaps I can put all these failings down to patchy consumer services. I’m sure I’ve had some corporate calls and not realised they were through IP telephony.
A few weeks ago I spoke to Günter Junk, chief executive of IP telephony vendor Swyx and an ex-managing director of Cisco Europe, about this issue. He said that all the technical problems have been solved and that business class IP telephony now gives sufficiently good call quality to realise that old dream, the death of the telephone. Junk also predicted that voice would become software integrated into all applications, so that eventually when we open up an application the voice setup would be seamless and automatic.
Something similar will happen with video over IP. At some point businesses should be able to see and talk to customers without both sides looking like Frankenstein’s monster, or sounding like they are conversing through a pair of tin cans connected by a piece of string, or paying through the nose for the privilege.
When these three factors will align is anybody’s guess. For now, the higher end video conferencing systems, such as HP’s high-fidelity Halo, are prohibitively expensive for all but the largest corporations.
And yes, I do expect to receive a shedload of email telling me I’ve got it all wrong.
