It was another rainy December day at Internet World this week, but inside, Intel was aglow over its latest "solution," the Internet video phone. You'll play games with your cousins over the Net, talk to family members, and reach a new level of intimacy in video chat rooms, Intel boasted.
But that level of intimacy has all the quality of footage from Apollo 11. Motion is slow and stilted, and audio fades in and out - even in a controlled demo environment such as Intel's own corporate network.
"It's fair to say that Internet telephony is still in the hobbyist stage," said Stephen von Rump, vice president of enterprise marketing for MCI Communications.
Companies such as VocalTec and Intel are working feverishly to bring telephony - and video conferencing - to the Internet. Internet phones offer users the economy they've come to expect from Internet service - worldwide communications access for the cost of a local phone call.
But the savings users may see in long distance will likely be eaten up by the costs of better processing speed and more memory to handle all the overhead.
Enter Intel. Freshly minted Pentiums, now with the multimedia- and compression-capable MMX technology, await new applications. The video phone requires at least a Pentium 90 to receive video. Consumers will need the Pentium 133 to send their own footage across the Net.
Despite all the horsepower and memory, Intel and others are stymied by the capacity calamity. Once again, there's not enough bandwidth to go around. The problem is one of predictability, said Tim Dowling, Intel product manager.
Calls take random paths along the Internet, hopping from router to router until they reach their destination. The more hops your call takes, the lower the quality of the connection, said Dowling. In the Intel demonstration of the Internet video phone, Dowling estimated the call took 15 hops, each of which takes 250 milliseconds to relay information.
To alleviate this problem and others that are sure to bump up against the bandwidth barrier on the Internet, Intel has developed RSVP, a technology to put the predictability into Net telephony.
Harking back to the early days of long-distance telephony when you had to "book" a line to place a trunk call, RSVP "calls ahead" to reserve space along the network for an application to do its work. Making a conference call? The application will send out a signal across the network to the Internet access provider. The request is prioritized and bandwidth is doled out accordingly.
Although Intel began development of this technology 15 months ago, it is in the midst of testing it now. This past summer, the company began work on a testbed network with Cisco and MCI.
And Internet service provider BBN Planet is about to open up a pilot network of its own to test RSVP and other services. "We're creating a bandwidth-on-demand system," said Richard Blatt, service line manager with BBN Planet.
The glitches will be worked out in testing. What if a user can't reserve the bandwidth he needs? Blatt said BBN will look for a way to build into the system a method of alerting customers when the bandwidth requested isn't available and let them choose whether to sign on at a lower capacity - with the understanding that they'll receive more as space on the network frees up.
Whatever the cost and technology model, Web surfers will be champing at the bit for a way to get more predictable elbow room on a network that MCI estimates will be carrying roughly 100 terabytes per week.
