March 9, 2020
From Alexander Graham Bell to Unified Communications – Part 1: A Tour Down the Memory Lane
On February 12, 1877, Alexander Graham Bell made the first “long-distance” telephone call in human history, from the Lyceum in Salem to Watson at the Boston Globe in Boston. This was all of 17.6 miles. A century later, telephone calls occurred routinely between continents and voice communications occurred between the NASA mission control on earth and the astronauts on the moon.
Although the concept of video telephony was raised at the same time as the original voice telephony, the first public video telephone service wasn’t offered until 1936 in Germany, between Berlin and Leipzig (~100 miles). However, that was really a combination of television broadcasting and voice telephony.
It wasn’t until April 20, 1964, when AT&T demonstrated long distance video telephony between Disneyland and the World’s Fair in New York, using its Model 1 Picturephone over standard PSTN lines. But, AT&T only launched the first commercial video conferencing service, based on the “Mod II” Picturephone, using 3 twisted-pair POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) lines, on July 1, 1970.
During the 1970s, video telephony services were introduced in France, Sweden, and United Kingdom. However, as with AT&T’s Picturephone, all of these video telephony services were commercial failures, due to the high cost and the low video quality and frame rates of the analog telecommunications technology at the time.
In the 1980s, with the rise of the VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) and the fiber optics, the telecom industry started the transition to the synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH) and the synchronous optical networking (SONET) transmission systems. However, these still carried the synchronous, time-division multiplexed (TDM) circuits, which hadn’t changed all that much since the voice telephony service was introduced by Bell Telephone.
In parallel, during the 1970s and the 1980s, the deployment and the fast growths of the TCP/IP based, packet switched ARPAnet, along with the rapid advances in digital computing and the development of the voice and image compressions, the revolution to the traditional telecommunications was taking shape outside of the telecom industry.
I was fortunate to not only have witnessed the revolution in this space, but also partook in the exciting journey and the some of the contentious battles between the old and the new worlds.
In the summer of 1991, I came across a research paper from MIT Media Lab on their demonstration of interactive voice communications over Ethernet, a year or two earlier. That was an exciting confirmation of the viability of duplex voice communication over “high speed” local area networks (LAN), as I was developing advanced distributed real-time systems at the TRW Space and Defense sector, including the participation in the standards activities of the Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI), the real-time protocols for the tactical systems, and the client-server based applications for the tactical intelligence collection systems.
Pumped by the Media Lab paper, my team replicated and demonstrated a packet-based voice intercom application, as part of the real-time distributed system, between Ethernet connected Sun Microsystems SPARCstation workstations to the Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) at Ft. Huachuca in Arizona in early 1992.
Then, we added one-way, low frame-rate, high quality video, using hardware Motion-JPEG compression, to form the multimedia communications over the IP/Ethernet LAN, and demonstrated the capabilities in Ft. Monmouth, NJ in 1993.
These led to my joining the then newly created 3Com Technology Development Center (TDC) in Jan. 1996, to spearhead the effort to promote the wide commercial adoption of interactive multimedia communications and related killer applications. Based on the guaranteed-latency Priority Access Controlled Ethernet (PACE) technology, we demonstrated at multiple large tradeshows the high resolution, full frame-rate, MPEG compressed, 2-way videoconferencing using newly released 3Com 100BaseT Ethernet switches and NICs, at over 3 Mbps.
On the heel of the successful LAN demonstration, I started approaching the primary Private Branch Exchange (PBX) vendors Lucent and Nortel in late 1996 on the idea of moving to IP based voice services. Not too unexpected, they mostly laughed at the idea. But, the landscape changed quickly and dramatically within the next 2 years, with the Voice-over-IP (VoIP) movement picked up steam across the Internet communities.
As the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) started working on the H.323 standard in 1996, the voice on the Network (VON) Coalition was formed in late 1996 and the Internet Draft of SIP: Session Invitation Protocol, was presented at IETF in March, 1997. The Internet Telephony Forum followed in the fall of 1997.
In late 1997, when I met VocalTec, one of the VoIP pioneers that released its first IP-voice product for the Microsoft Windows PCs in 1995, VocalTec’s VoIP products were already in wide use by the PC users across the world. Granted, the voice quality left a lot to be desired in those early days. But, the market demands was clear, which led to the explosive growth of Skype, after its founding in 2003.
On the enterprise equipment side, Cisco announced its acquisition of Selsius Systems (an IP telephony equipment vendor formed in July, 1997) in the Nov. of 1998, followed by 3Com’s acquisition of NBX (vendor of Ethernet-based phone systems) in 1999.
Fast forward 2 decades, the “legacy” SDH/SONET have fallen out of favor and being replaced by more cost-effective IP networks. The POTS lines only remains where old die-hards still want a phone line that would remain alive when the utility power service isn’t available after a major natural disaster. The PBXs have not only become software, but have moved into the clouds. The voice services revenue continues to decline for the telecom carriers.
Under the competitive pressure from the Over-the-Top (OTT) cloud-based web-scale players, from Skype (now owned by Microsoft), Google Voice, Facebook WhatsApp, to Tencent WeChat, the telecom carriers have been forced to move away from the expensive proprietary equipment towards the open-source software and virtualized network functions (VNFs) running on commodity white boxes in the Internet Data Centers (IDCs).
The early dominant videoconferencing system vendors, such as PictureTel, have been replaced by the web-based Webex (founded in 1995 and acquired by Cisco in 2007), which has in turn been overtaken by Zoom (founded in 2011 by a former Webex lead engineer).
Zoom’s agnostic nature on packet Internet or switched voice circuit voice connections, and the popularity of text/voice chat among the younger generations, reflect the market forces behind the trend toward Unified Communications (UC), whether business-business (B2B) or business-consumer (B2C).
Today, the gen-Z takes for granted the FaceTime and Zoom conferences. How the world has changed in a quarter of a century, compared to the first 100 years of voice telephony. What does the next decade hold and what will the UC evolve to in another 10 years?