Paul E. Jones

I spend much of my time working in the IP Multimedia Communications (▲IPMC) area, including ▲VoIP and ▲videoconferencing products based on ITU Recommendation ▲H.323, IETF ▲SIP and other packet-based conversational protocols. I am also a co-founder of Packetizer.

I have been actively involved in work related to IPMC (or, "▲IP telephony") for quite some time now and I really enjoy it. As part of my work, I have attend the meetings or participated in discussions with groups such as the ITU SG16, IMTC, ETSI TIPHON, and the IETF. I have served as editor of Recommendation H.323 and am currently serving as Rapporteur of Question 2 (▲H.323) and Question 12 (▲AMS) in ITU-T SG16. I have also served as editor several other ITU Recommendation and made numerous contributions to the work in the ITU. I have also authored or co-authored several Internet drafts and RFCs published in the IETF. It keeps me very busy, but it has been a great experience.

IPMC is a very active area, allowing a convergence of PSTN, mobile systems, and packet-based communication. More importantly, I suppose, is that IP telephony is opening the door for the broader area of "multimedia communications." Prior to joining doing a lot of work on ▲VoIP, I did work in the multipoint data conferencing area, focusing primarily on on the ITU-T standard ▲T.120. As we go forward, I expect to see more convergence of voice telephony with video and data conferencing technologies. People will not only be able to talk, but also see the other people in a conference and, perhaps, edit a document together in real time. H.323 is the only standards-based protocol that enables precisely this type of multimedia conferencing and collaboration today.

Most recently, I started research on ▲AMS, which is destined to be the next generation multimedia system. This is still extremely early in development and is not likely to be ready for a few years, but that depends on industry interest. In any case, most experts in the real-time communication industry recognize that there is a need for something revolutionary. H.323 and SIP are not it: they merely took us from TDM to IP. Now it is time to take full advantage of the IP network. AMS will enable, not only voice and video, but also file sharing, application sharing, "screen sharing", video gaming, etc. Today, these technologies operate as isolated functions, but AMS will tie them all together quite naturally. Life will be a whole lot simpler with AMS.

I have also been fortunate to have had the opportunity to speak at a number of industry events, including ones sponsored by IMTC, UpperSide, VON, FCC, TDI, H.323 Forum, ViDe, and the ITU. I have also had articles published or been interviewed for articles in numerous publications, including Internet Telephony, CPMNet Asia, ComputerWorld China, ComputerWorld Hong Kong, Telecom Asia, Voice and Data, and Light Reading.

Outside of multimedia communications, I enjoy talking walks through cities in various countries I visit. So far, I've had the opportunity to visit Australia, Canada, Chile, China, Belgium, Brazil, England, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Norway, Singapore, South Korea, and Switzerland. Of course, since almost all of these countries were visited on business, I don't often get to do too much touring.