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May 30, 2013

Business Video Connectivity Quietly Advances

By Doug Mohney, Contributing Editor

Over the past two years, service providers have been building interconnections to facilitate seamless video conferencing between their respective networks. France Telecom (soon to be just Orange) and Deutsche Telekom's (News - Alert) T-Systems are the latest providers to announce provider-to-provider IP interconnections specifically for video.



"We've setup up a dedicated pipe between our two networks," said Andrew McFadzen, head of International Network Solutions (News - Alert) at Orange Business Service and a member of the board at MEF (Metro Ethernet Forum), "When a customer wants to have a video meeting, they setup the call connecting via a dial in number."

The ease of a "dial in number" to make seamless video calls between networks has been lacking until recently. Enterprises would invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in elaborate telepresence rooms and find them only able to communicate with other devices on their own network. Trying to setup a video experience with business partners or customers with the same or interoperable equipment turned into an elaborately complex exercise because of SBC and security considerations.

McFadzen said that over the past two years, Orange has established direct interconnections with nine carriers and service providers, rattling off AT&T, Bharti Airtel, BT, Tata Communications (News - Alert), Telefonica and Verizon on the carrier side and BCS Global and Glopoint as managed service providers.

The interface with T-Systems is representative is a simple direct Gigabit Ethernet between the two carriers established at a mutual point of presence in Frankfurt, Germany. Orange had no problem justifying a direct connecting given the large volume of business between France and Germany. (I also suspect that ongoing cooperation between DT and Orange to share networks and resources didn't hurt).

"It's complex for all carriers to bi-laterally connect," said McFadzen. "The OVCC consortium is building a more meshed approach. There are four core network providers and other service providers will connect to the core on a Layer 3 network. It's more cost effective in the longer term, with multiple carriers working with each other with a lot less physical interconnection.

OVCC, the Open Visual Communications Consortium, formally launched in October 2011, brought together together service providers with Dialogic, Polycom (News - Alert), and other video equipment vendors to work on better interoperability between business-to-business solutions. Today, members include Acme Packet, Avaya, Huawei, IntelePeer, Microsoft (News - Alert), Sonus Networks and ZTE.

A lot of the work revolves around using service provider VPNs for video conferencing, rather than a quality-of-service (QoS) deficient generic "Internet" IP connection. Service providers have had to work in linking together their VPN "islands" and putting commercial models in place.




Edited by Jamie Epstein
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