The Problem With Video Phone Calling
Posted: November 26th, 2008 | Author: Garrett Smith | Filed under: VoIP Commentary | 3 Comments »Video phone calling technology has been around for quite some time. It holds a very promising future. Despite this, it has never seemed to gain the sort of prominence many folks would have thought.
I now know why.
The problem with video phone calling (not Skype), is that the experience is not plug-n-play. And it needs to be.
Over the last few days I have been playing with Video phone calling and I can say that I was hoping for a bit more of a plug-n-play scenario. Unfortunately, the experiences I have been having are less then ideal and akin to what I have experienced in the past with video phone calling.Too many variables. Too much networking involved. Too much uncertainty.
I am not blaming the hardware or the service I am testing. It is not their fault my connection and home network is ruining the experience. But it is their hurdle to success.
I couldn’t imagine grandpa or grandma (a solid vertical for this technology) optimizing their home router or discussing bandwidth shaping with their residential Internet provider in order to get great QoS. Video phone providers might have solved the problems when it comes to businesses, thanks to education and large pipes becoming available, but for the residential market, it still has not address the network issues that will continue to limit it’s growth.
Setting up the video phone and video phone service was easy, but I still need to make network changes in order to actually experience the technology as it was intended. This is something I am capable of doing, but how many others are? Not enough (and why should they have to anyways?).
The key to victory and the one who will take home the spoils is the video phone calling service that figure out how to address the network issues. Until then, I am afraid that video calling, for average folk, might be relegated to the desktop experience.
I don’t know if you’ve seen the ASUS AiGuru SV1, which is a Skype certified desktop videophone – it’s a zero-config plug and play device which should be ideal for the grandma and grandpa market.
As it runs an embedded version of Skype, it should avoid the need to play around with router settings or get into lengthy discussions with ISPs – and at the same time it’s a simple device without the trappings of the conventional computer required to run standard versions of Skype.
[...] What’s the problem with video calling? Find out at Smith on VoIP. [...]
I know this post is half-year old, but what if you don’t want Skype (not me)?
I mean, what if you really want an SIP-based video phone (SIP is Session Initiated Protocol)? (Note that Skype does not support SIP.) SIP is very useful if you want to dial a 10-digit number, and it can allow you to have a video-based PBX system — even software based, such as trixbox. Okay, I know this is not for grandma and grandpa, but I’m thinking if there’re any possibilities that could make videophones work and be able to use any videophone providers as an alternative to Skype.