By Oren Libis
Today, 3G-324M is used for video telephony and it is deployed in Europe and Asia, and many many handsets. China is now joining the bandwagon as well, with their TD-SCDMA network.
At the IMTC, we have been covering the adoption of 3G-324M over the last several years, especially from the point of view of the handset. This includes interoperability testing between two points, each running 3G-324M. During that time, we focused on making sure that channels are opened properly, and that video codecs are negotiated reasonably. From there, we moved on to handling call setup time. Along the way, other technical issues were dealt with and solved.
Today, I feel confident that the technical issues of video calls between two handsets are solved. The level of interoperability we have achieved within our group is high. I am also quite impressed by the level of interoperability that the newest addition to the standard – H.324 Annex K (also known is MONA) enjoys. I had my doubts, but during the last SuperOp! event on April, I was able to interoperate quite well with several vendors – no small achievement for a new specification that several companies are implementing independently.
And this led me to think about what’s next in store for our Activity Group. 3G-324M is relatively limited. You can use it to open multiple multimedia channels between two points, and this is mainly used to execute video telephony calls. You can try adding text, adding more codecs or trying to increase the bandwidth, but I believe the next challenge for the 3G-324M AG will be services.
As 3G-324M is used by operators to offer interactive video services to customers, our primary concern should be making sure that 3G-324M is as flexible as possible for services. We already have basic calls up and running well. But there are other technical aspects that didn’t get as much attention as they needed. Deploying a video ring-back tone service, for example, is a technical challenge due to the way 3G-324M is defined. This is an issue that makes the deployment of such a service so expensive to operators. From my conversations with service providers, I believe that there are a lot more services that subscribers would like, but we don’t handle well enough. So we have our work cut out for us.
If you are an operator or if you are in the business of developing services for operators, I suggest you join the IMTC 3G-324M Activity Group. The time has come to make 3G-324M services a reality.
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