The Unfriendly Skies

One of the side effects of being a Harvard faculty member and being chair of HITSP is traveling for teaching and collaboration around the world. In 2007, I've flown about 400,000 miles. This morning, on my way to give a keynote my flight was cancelled for no apparent reason. Every other flight to my destination was overbooked. The combination of high fuel prices, heightened security concerns, overbooked flights and surly airline employees makes flying a truly unpleasant experience. I finally asked the airline folk to consider other airports within 60 miles of Boston, then drove to Providence, went standby on several connecting flights and arrived on time to my keynote.

Days like today make me believe we should stop most travel to out of town meetings and shift to web-based collaboration tools. As I mentioned in my earlier blog entry , I'm testing these tools as part of an evaluation of flexible work arrangements. Today's experience motivated me to test video conferencing solutions.

I tested the following

Windows - Polycom PVX software, using H323 and SIP teleconferning protocols over IP.
MacIntosh - Xmeeting, an open source H323 and SIP teleconferencing tool
Ubuntu Linux - Ekiga, an open source H323 and SIP teleconferencing tool.


My first observation about video conferencing is that poor video can be tolerated, but audio must be nearly perfect for the technology to be useful. Polycom has figured that out, and seems to preferentially use available bandwidth to ensure the quality of the audio. I used the windows-based Polycom PVX software to connect via H323 to a MacIntosh running Xmeeting. It worked perfectly, offering 'good enough' video from my desktop Logitech Fusion camera and headset microphone. The MacIntosh side provided barely passable audio and passable video. iChat via IM seems to provide much higher quality audio and video on a Mac than the Xmeeting H323 approach. IP-based teleconferencing worked on these machines without any configuration hassales or configuration incompabilities. My experience with H320 ISDN teleconferencing which requires a series of digital telephone lines is that it can be quite finicky. Typically when I do ISDN teleconferencing, the engineers on both sides of the call need 30 minutes to ensure equipment compatbility and get the connection working. I've had many ISDN teleconferencing presentations fail completely, be interupted mid presentation and have variable quality during the course of the call.

My second experiment involved connecting a MacIntosh running Xmeeting with an Ubuntu Linux laptop running Ekiga. Although bandwidth should have been sufficient, I found that the Linux laptop did not perform the audio or video tasks well. This could have been because the laptop has low powered graphics hardware and only a 1.06 Ghz core solo, however, many other folks I've spoken with with have found that Linux does not seemed to be an optimal platform for high end real time audio/video applications at this time.

The bottom line of these experiments is that PolyCom seems to really have a business quality desktop teleconferencing solution that enables me to connect with collaborators using H323 protocols. Xmeeting came in second place, offering barely passive audio quality and passable video quality. Ekiga was not usable for business purposes, although it may suffice for casual chat.

The big question is whether or not the video is even necessary. Maybe a still photo and crisp bidirectional audio is sufficient for a meeting. The technology is ready to replace airline travel with desktop teleconferencing, but our business culture is not. We want to be about to reach out and touch the speaker, even if it means traveling thousands of miles and enduring the pain and expense of domestic airlines. As oil prices continue to rise and as climate change accelerates, it may be that economic and social forces will align to minimize physical travel and encourage us all to use low cost bandwidth from the comfort of our homes and offices instead.

The positive aspects of H323 was that the standards were mature, I did not encounter any firewall issues, and cross platform communication worked among all the computers and operating systems I own.

The downside is that it uses bandwidth for video that may not be truly necessary. My next step will be to explore the collaboration tools such as Webex, Adobe Connect (used to be Macromedia Breeze), and Elluminate to determine if audio plus shared presentations/whiteboards is a better fit to meet the needs of my road warrior travel schedule.