Packetizer News

Experts working on the next generation multimedia communication system known as AMS recently completed a meeting, reaching some important decisions on architecture, terminology, and protocol syntax used in the new system. The new system will be a decomposed system, allowing anyone to create new applications and will utilize XML as the basis for the signaling protocol. You can read the full story here.

ITU-T SG16 formally approved Question 12 as a new Question focused on the study of the Advanced Multimedia System. This is really exciting, as we are now looking toward the future of distributed communication capabilities and truly enabling coordinated multimedia applications -- something that the industry has, thus far, not successfully delivered.

So, work on AMS is moving ahead! During this meeting that just concluded in Geneva, a number of new requirements were added to the AMS project, the AMS project description was reviewed, and the experts agreed on a document that that will serve as the skeleton document for the AMS terminal architecture.

The next meeting of Question 12 will be held in late June or early July 2008 in North Carolina, USA. The exact date and location of the meeting will be sent to the SG16 mailing list once it has been finalized. For information related various AMS-related mailing lists, visit http://www.packetizer.com/voip/h325/lists.html.

The Packetizer VoIP Bandwidth Calculator was recently updated to include a Spanish translation! This is exciting since, although Packetizer's visitors come from nearly every country in the world, this is the first non-English web page published by Packetizer. While trying to make the entire Packetizer site multilingual would prove to be a nearly impossible task, certain content like the VoIP Bandwidth Calculator are definitely good candidates for translation since it is such a useful tool.

We would like to reach out to the Packetizer Community and ask for your help: if you are a user of the VoIP Bandwidth Calculator and would be willing to provide us with a translation into a different language, do it! We will gladly put up any language version that is provided to us. All we would need is a translation of the text that appears on the page in your language in either a Word file or a UTF-8-encoded .txt file.

ITU-T SG16 Question 12 met last week in Seoul, South Korea to make progress on the requirements for the Advanced Multimedia System (AMS). A lot of progress was made, with requirements coming from several companies and integrated into a single document. While the requirements have largely focused on the terminal equipment thus far, it is very clear that AMS represents a significantly different kind of system than what was delivered with legacy systems like SIP and H.323. The next SG16 meeting at the end of April 2008 will make more progress on requirements, but will also begin to seriously examine system architecture proposals.

For those working on open source H.323 projects, you have undoubtedly had some difficulty accessing mailing lists, finding current code, or finding a person to whom you could ask questions. Further, the old OpenH323 site has not been updated for nearly four years. We found that terribly unfortunate since work is and has been actively ongoing, in spite of the OpenH323 site owner's reluctance to keep the site updated. So, we worked with the open-source developer community to launch a new open-source H.323 web site and created new associated mailing lists. The new site is called H.323 Plus (or, as some prefer, "H323plus").

We are repeatedly hearing that SIP is an "emerging" technology (for a decade now!) and that SIP is simpler than H.323, etc. Well, most of the folks who frequent Packetizer know very well this is a lie. Today, I read and article that really took this to the extreme, saying that SIP had better "voice performance". SIP uses RTP. H.323 uses RTP. SIP uses the same codecs as H.323. They have the same voice performance. Is the success of SIP dependently entirely on ignorance and misinformation?

While VoIP is still considered to be a very young technology in the eyes of many, it has made a huge impact on the telecommunications business. But, VoIP was just a first step. What is about to come with AMS is another revolution in communication that will enable far more capability and functionality than the first generation VoIP networks of today. See this article.

The ITU completed work on the AMS Project Description. The Advanced Multimedia System (AMS) is viewed as a significant leap forward for multimedia systems, with capabilities that extend beyond the classic videoconferencing systems of today. With AMS, users would be able to use a multiplicity of devices and applications, seamlessly interconnected, in order to enable provide a significantly improved means of communicating than was ever possible before. This is very cool technology!

Back in December, there was news that the ITU would publish its standards free of charge. This was a temporary "trial" period, as it turned out. However, today we learned that the ITU has decided to make the standards available free of charge permanently.

We re-introduced the VoIP jobs page about 10 months ago. Unfortunately, we've had very few job postings (in spite of the fact that listing is free). Thinking we ought to just get rid of the page, I checked the server statistics and discovered that the RSS news feed is viewed by a large number of people and pulls in more hits than any other single file on Packetizer! So, we'll keep it here a while longer. I sure do wish employers would take note and use the opportunity to reach a wide audience!