I admire those able to make blog entries in real time during a conference and still pay attention to what's going on. On May 10th-12th I participated in IMTC Forum 2005, but during the conference, I only made brief notes in my notebook. And then other priorities came along... Here are some impressions.
The IMTC is an industry association best known for championing video telephony. Many of the attendees have devoted 10, 15, even 20 years of effort to making video telephony work. I on the other hand was merely a bystander until four years ago (when NMS got intensely involved in early 3G-324M development in Japan). Luckily I have followed the industry from the sidelines for many years, through friends at Picturetel in the early nineties and as a supplier in the mid-90s when NMS sold interface boards to Video Server Inc. So at least I knew some of the history. And the conference atmosphere was very good -- I felt comfortable engaging the old timers, questioning the experts and pushing back when I didn't agree.
A number of the attendees are also active on ITU, ETSI and ISO working groups, indeed several ITU working group chairs spoke, and that perspective was very evident. With a few exceptions, the general view was that useful telecom over IP will require a carefully architected next generation network that guarantees QoS, such as IMS. I found this implicit assumption curious in a group where a third or more use Skype! (I know because I asked for a show of hands). On the other hand, there wasn't the BellHead - NetHead animosity you find in some groups. My nethead point of view was obvious, but at least three different people complimented me for my questioning of speakers (which I did at some length).
My other major impression: What a broad range of topics! From markets and applications, to reports on standards activities, to discussion of specific architectural issues, to a (very interesting) deep dive into entropy coding by Dr. Wen Chen. It was all educational for me, but I wondered if the marketing folks were really interested in entropy coding or NAT traversal.
Although I missed the opening keynote on Tuesday, I gather Andrew Davis of Wainhouse Research confirmed that industry revenues are flat. Corinne Delfour of France Telecom described the work done in France to make Orange's mobile video interoperate with France Telecom's MaLigne visio service and with video over the Internet. The service was launched in time for Christmas 2004, the marketing sounds very impressive, the startup costs are low and the service is priced the same as voice calls. After her presentation, I asked how many subscribers they have signed up. As of April, Orange has 35K mobile video telephony subscribers but "the service is not heavily used"; FT has 6k subscribers for MaLigne visio and there about 25K Internet video telephony users for a grand total of ~65K subscribers. Rather disappointing...
All of the presentations are now available on the web thru this page. I'll give some additional comments and describe my presentation in a subsequent post.
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