Hope you can forgive me the attempt at a humor but it seems that absolutely everybody writing on the Internet is predicting that videoconferencing will kill business travel.  (Planes take off?  Videoconferencing takes off?)  I don’t know how serious the damage will be, but it does look like there is something to the story.  Business can reduce costs in a big way and reduce the carbon footprint, too, by making more and better use of videoconferencing technologies.

But business can actually be somewhat slow to grab the advantages of new technology and things slow down even more if the new alternative—in this case, Internet videoconferencing—isn’t at least as effective as the old alternative, i.e., planes and hotels and rental cars.

So, is Internet videoconferencing as effective as flying to a face-to-face meeting?  I believe it can be.  I believe that as business people we are comfortable with the concept.  Where I believe we are still having trouble is with the implementation; with the smoothness and coherence of the typical Internet videoconference.  Many business people are justifiably uncomfortable with a videoconference where the images and audio out of sync, or one where the video breaks up into a pixelated patchwork, or one that freezes up entirely.  It is hard to argue that this kind of videoconference makes for a better meeting than one with everybody at the same table.

So, how to fix this implementation problem?  There are, in my view, two approaches.   One is to move the videoconferences off of the Internet entirely and into a dedicated network services pipe that is not shared, has a ton of bandwidth, and a complicated Quality of Service (QoS) Service Level Agreement (SLA).  This approach has some problems, of course.  It is very, very expensive, , it imposes a significant management burden, and it is only viable if the “other end” of the videoconference is using the same pipe.

The other approach—the preferred approach—is to make the best  possible use of the best efforts network that is the Internet and in order to do that it is necessary to deal with packet loss.  Packet loss, a phenomenon inherent to the Internet, is the mortal enemy of motion video.  Take care of packet loss, and the public Internet can be a terrific carrier of videoconferences.  This approach has some serious advantages.  It is really cheap, it adds no management burden at all, and all businesses are using the Internet and ready to take your videoconference call.

The commentators and journalists and market analysts are right—Internet videoconferencing is the next big business thing and it will soon take off for a long and profitable flight.  The one obstacle still blocking the runway is packet loss.  Take care packet loss and it’ll be time to stow the trays and put the seats in their full upright position.