I’m always on the lookout for success stories about the use of video conferencing and video phones because it seems so obvious that the technology is good for everyone.

A rather nice story crossed my desk this week from Tandberg; it has just installed its 101st video conferencing system at the UHI Millennium Institute in Scotland. UHI is a collection of higher education establishments spread over the Highlands and Islands. It makes extensive use of video conferencing to help knit together the 15 colleges and their students. This saves a lot of time and effort because students can have a virtual presence at lectures from remote sites. The staff also use video conferencing to co-ordinate activities across the region.

This is a classic example of how video conferencing can improve the quality of life for everyone involved and help to save the planet at the same time. Whenever I write about video phone technology I wonder what obstacles remain to its widespread use in business. I haven’t heard any new ones recently and all the ones I know about have technical solutions. Perhaps there will soon be a boom.

If you think that commercial video conferencing systems give poor quality, blocky video and are a pain to set up, look again. Top-end systems now have excellent video quality, largely thanks to the latest video codec, which is called H.264 (also known as MPEG4 part 10), and the larger bandwidths available nowadays.

The H.264 encoder has a high computational demand and it was thought that it would be a long time before it could be implemented on PCs without hardware assistance. However, there are now several software-based systems that are capable of high performance. The first one I saw is called vPoint HD from Emblaze-VCON and requires a 2.6GHz Pentium 4 to do its stuff. Polycom has a product called PVX that does similar things.

Tandberg has taken a different approach and has developed a server-based system called Movi. PC clients use a web browser to contact the server and no special software has to be installed on the client. The system was announced as we went to press and uses full-duplex audio over a 768kbit/s SIP stream.

Low-price, dedicated video phones aimed at the residential broadband market are also available. H.264 can provide good quality video on a basic ADSL connection but works even better on an ADSL2 link taking advantage of the higher upstream speeds. About a year ago, Grandstream announced an H.264 video phone, the GXV-3000, that retails for about £160. There are also others in the same area, such as the BT Videophone 2000.

If the residential video phone market expands it won’t be long before users want to make video calls to commercial organisations. Will your company be ready?