XOP Blog

Bandwidth considerations when using desktop video conferencing

by Sudhir on March 10th, 2012
Posted In: Web Conferencing

Several of the popular hosted web conference service providers have added the so called video capability to their web conference service. Basic idea is to promote visual interaction between a moderator and fellow participants. This is a great new addition specially in light of the fact that most PCs and Laptops have webcams built into them. However, these services provide desktop video conferencing simply by streaming video between all parties involved. So if a moderator and 4 other participants are involved in one such video conference, then each participant will transmit one video stream and receive 4 video streams. If each video stream takes – say 300 Kilobits/sec, then each participant will be receiving 300 Kb/s x 4 = 1.2 Mb/s. This solution can still work in current broadband environment as DSL and Cable plants are assymetric (less upstream, more downstream) in nature. However, as the number of participants increases, this solution can severely strain the individual pipes. Other bigger issue with this arrangement is what happens at the video conference bridge that is located at the hosted service providers end. There the bandwidth required grows as n squared and not as n. With the example under discussion, the bandwidth needed at the hosted service provider will be 5 x 1.2 MB/s = 6 MB/s. So in order to support this type of desktop video conferencing, the service provider will need very large amount of bandwidth just to serve a few customers.

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Web Conferencing Solutions – The Right Choice

by Sudhir on August 1st, 2011
Posted In: Web Conferencing

Web conferencing has now become a routinely used tool for business communications. Typically it is used to enable collaboration between multiple people so that they can work on one document together. In order to share a document the document is uploaded to the web conferencing server. The server converts the individual pages of the document into separate JPEG charts. These charts are then viewable on the browsers of people participating in the meeting. Some of the advanced web conferencing services provide annotation tools that can be used to mark up documents. The JPEG approach is fine as long as there is no animation or motion in the document. A better approach is to use MPEG based video instead of JPEG. In this case the web conferencing server creates a MPEG video which preserves the motion. This approach is also more amenable for integrating video streams showing the talking heads of people participating in the conference.

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Voice Mail Solution for Business

by admin on July 2nd, 2011
Posted In: Visual Voicemail

I am a busy realtor. All day I run around showing different properties to my clients. Several of my clients and colleagues leave voicemail messages for me. Some leave a message on my home answering machine, some leave messages on my cell phone, others at my office. Typically I may have 10-15 messages waiting for me at any given time. Sometimes I know I may have an important message left for me, however I don’t access it as I don’t have the time to listen to all of my mes-sages before I get to the message that I am really interested in. One of my clients sug-gested that I switch to XOP Network’s Business Voice Mail Service. I did. The ser-vice is awesome. Now all of my voice-mails from my office, my cell and my house are automatically forwarded as emails to my IPhone. I can see the caller id, and the duration of each message on a web portal. I click on the ones that are more important to me, and viola’ I am able to hear them right on my IPhone. And the best part is that I don’t burn any cell minutes while I listen to my voice-mails. As the caller ID is displayed on my IPhone, I simply click on the number shown and call back to the ones I need to respond to quickly. This service saves me at least one hour per day.

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How to build an Audio Conference Bridge 6000 miles away?

by Chris on May 22nd, 2011
Posted In: Audio Conferencing

In UK, the phone companies now sell SIP trunks similar to as in USA. One of our UK customers wanted to buy our conference bridge and deploy it on their newly acquired SIP trunk. Normally we would have shipped our Universal Service Node conference bridge from US loaded with ‘n’ SIP ports and our Audio Conferencing application software. Customer was in bit of a rush to get this done. Customer already had a HP Proliant server with adequate configuration. So here is what we did. We had the customer load Linux operating system on it. Linux is an open source operating system so it is available for a free download from a number of companies such as Red Hat, CentOS etc. It took them about 30 minutes to install Linux. Meanwhile, we emailed our Audio Conferencing application RPM to the customer. After loading the OS, customer installed the Audio Conferencing RPM. Next, using the web portal associated with the application just installed, we helped configure the appropriate IP addresses – one for the platform itself and those associated with the SIP trunk. Next, we had them reboot the server. Two minutes later, the customer had a working USN based audio conference bridge. Customer already had a dial in number associated with the SIP trunk. So at this point the participants were able to dial in that number and conduct a VoIP based conference call on our USN. The point of this blog is that with SIP trunking no specialized telephony hardware is required and hence we can literally email a telephony appliance instead of going through the trouble of shipping an entire USN server.

SIP based Conference Bridge

VoIP Conference Bridge

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Firebar is not just the Name of a Local Drinking Establishment or a Russian Fighter Jet

by Doug on May 13th, 2011
Posted In: Audio Conferencing, Firebar Conferencing

Google ‘Firebar’ and you will see names of many drinking establishments around the USA and a fighter jet in Russia. However, this term is also used for a very clever combination of two telephony applications: Mass Notification and Audio Conferencing and is used by first responders in emergency situations around the country.

Firebar (aka, dial out conferencing) is used to inform and bring a group of first responders into an emergency audio conference. Firebar is a very fast, efficient and cost effective way of getting vital information to first responders in a emergency situation and has been in use for many years. XOP Networks has modernized the Firebar concept so that it is effective in SIP/IP and fiber to the home networks.

Many volunteer fire departments around the country use Firebar. In most cases independent telephone companies like American Broadband in Blair, Nebraska and Grafton Technologies in Jersey County Illinois supply Firebar service to local fire departments. In the case of American Broadband and Grafton Technologies they used the Universal Service Node from XOP Networks equipped with the Enhanced Firebar Application to provide the Firebar service.

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Conference Bridge DTMF Control Emulation

by Chris on May 7th, 2011
Posted In: Audio Conferencing, General

Several conference bridges have been deployed in the network for a number of years. Due to technical obsolesence or due to lack of support from their original manufacturers some of these bridges are being replaced by newer bridges. Most legacy bridges allow various in-conference controls such as Mute/ Unmute, Lock/ Unlock, Start /Stop recording etc., based on use of DTMF key presses. However, since these bridges came from different manufacturers, they all use different key sequences for similar functions. Since the bridge users get accustomed to using their DTMF controls, they resist learning new controls that typically accompany a newer bridge. Hence, anyone trying to evaluate a new bridge should look into if the new bridge can emulate DTMF controls supported by their legacy bridge.

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Why Scheduled Dial Out Audio Conferencing Makes Good Sense?

by Sudhir on March 13th, 2011
Posted In: Audio Conferencing

Consider the case of a VP of Sales who wants to get a status from his/her staff every Monday morning at 9 am. He schedules a confernece call at 9 am using a managed conferencing service offered by the phone company. He gets the dial in number and the participant PIN from the phone company for his meet me conference and sends it to his 10 staff members. Come Monday, at 9 am he dials into the hosted conference. Out of the expected 10 salesmen only 5 show up. He waits for another 10 minutes, then calls his admin to call the missing 5 salesmen and ask them to join the conference. Thanks to admin’s frantic calling, two more people join the conference. As usual, the VP of Sales conducts his business, and sends a ‘you better join the call next Monday’ note to the salesmen who did not join. This frustrating experience described above repeats itself every Monday!

On the other hand, the CFO of the company was looking for ways to cut down the monthly audio conferencing costs. So he authorized purchase of an in-house audio conference bridge. The CIO researched the market and selected XOP Networks’ USN conference bridge for that purpose.

During one of the presentations made related with the newly acquired conference server, the VP of Sales noticed a feature being presented called ‘scheduled re-curring dial out audio conferencing’. Upon further investigations from the system administrator, he learnt that the bridge could automatically dial out to his 10 salesmen every Monday morning at 9 am, look for participants at their multiple phones numbers (office, cell, home etc.) and automatically pull them into his conference. Those who still did not join the conference call, the bridge would send them reminder voice/sms messages.

“Sounds very interesting” he said to the system admin and asked him to set up his Monday 9 am conference as a re-curring scheduled conference. Come Monday morning the system dialed out to the VP of Sales and his 10 salesmen at exactly 9 am. To his great surprise, within less than 30 seconds all 10 salesmen were on the conference. The VP of Sales thanked the system admin profusely and has been a happy camper since.

Analyzing the results, the reasons for this noticeable change was, a) the salesmen did not have to remember to dial in, b) they could join the conference while driving , c) did not have to enter a PIN (after trying to remember it of course) while driving, d) could pick up the call from their home phone in case they were operating from the home office etc. Bottom line, the dial out mechanism reduced the pain associated with joining the Monday morning conference call and hence more people joined.

An additional benefit for VP of Sales was the peace of mind that only those people whom he authorized for a dial out could join the conference and that there was no one misusing the PINs and listening into his conference without his knowledge.

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No more support available for Spectel Bridge – What should I do now?

by Sudhir on November 14th, 2010
Posted In: Audio Conferencing

Spectel Inc., was an Irish company that was a dominant audio conference bridge supplier. Spectel was acquired by Avaya in August 2004. At the time of its acquisition Spectel had 500+ customers worldwide. These customers included both enterprises and service providers. Some of these customers still have the Spectel Bridges in service. Majority of these bridges were equipped with only TDM (T1/E1) Trunks. As the technology migrates towards VoIP, these customers have a choice to make. Should they upgrade their Spectel’s and add VoIP capability to them so that they can operate with both TDM and VoIP interfaces (hybrid mode) or completely replace them with VoIP technology? The decision has to be made after careful due diligence.

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