I attended Microsoft launch of the Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 in late 2007 and was astonished to witness video and phone calls placed over the internet with relatively good sound quality and video resolution.
The secret to this was with Microsoft’s new proprietary video and audio codecs called real-time video and real-time audio (also referred to as rtv and rta). They are adaptive codecs which scale the bandwidth utilisation according to the bandwidth availability.
Thanks to these codecs and to the philosophy of the OCS platform, it is possible to deliver audio and video (and more) to the desktop of a user, as well as to a desk (video-)phone and/or mobile phone. It is arguably possible to deliver these technologies without the necessity of implementing QoS on the corporate network.
These are the reasons for the popularity and uptake of Microsoft’s UC platform.
Having said that, the rest of the UC/VoIP/Video world has been using other codecs, which were suitable for the ISDN and the QoS enabled networks, namely the g711, g729 & g726 audio codecs and the h261,h263 & h264 video codecs.
As such, it is necessary to use intermediaries or media gateways to interface between the OCS platform and typically the sip gateway with the PSTN world.
At the time of writing this blog, there are a number of gateways which incorporate the rta codec.
Interoperability seems to be MS’s focus despite the fact that they use proprietary codecs. This allows Microsoft to deliver on performance over non-QoS network (typically the internet) and to interface with other sip implementations through the use of media gateways.
Tags: g711, h264, LinkedIn, OCS, OCS R2, office communication server, rta, rtv, unified communications
February 25, 2009 at 11:11 am |
[...] will be a necessary ingredient of your communication strategy. As discussed in my 1st post and 2nd post, gateways will interface with the PSTN cloud, help you integrate with the PABX and provide you with [...]
May 26, 2009 at 11:11 pm |
[...] will be a necessary ingredient of your communication strategy. As discussed in my 1st post and 2nd post, gateways will interface with the PSTN cloud, help you integrate with the PABX and provide you with [...]