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I just returned from Cisco Live in San Francisco, CA and was able to catch the keynote presentation by John Chambers. If there was a main message to take away, it would be one word – video. Video over the LAN, video over the WAN, video to the home, and yes, video over the WLAN. That reminds me, we need a new acronym. More on that later.
If you look at Cisco’s moves of recent, you can see how this thread continues to echo. The acquisition of Flip (the consumer digital video camera), the telepresence systems (at the high end), TV movie/sitcom product placements, WebEx meetings using PC-based cameras, and of course a myriad of mobile devices accessing video content via every communication medium…well, you get the point.
Sure, video generates a lot of latency-sensitive network workload and therefore should translate into more hardware iron sales. I get that. But, perhaps there is indeed something more to this....
When I’m not serving as an Industry Analyst for CWNP, my day job is working for a very large healthcare organization on the wireless enterprise engineering team. As you might guess, my team deals with engineering new applications. If the recent requests for new applications we’ve received are any gauge, I would have to say video is indeed on its way.
Right now, we think of, for example, radiology images as being part of the 'medical record,' but don’t think it’s going to stop there. Not only are those images becoming even higher and higher resolution (requiring more bandwidth and storage), but they will start moving on us. You can trust me when I tell you that your very near future medical records will have video assets. Think about the incredible medical value of high-definition footage for doctors comparing the differences in patient condition between patient visits. Remote diagnostics from industry specialists are a big deal as well.
How does this affect all of us wireless engineers?
Expect a lot of things to change. Right now, very few people really understand QoS. I’m not trying to insult anyone, but most of us may not have really HAD to use it that much until voice started hitting the WLAN/LAN. Mind you, I’m using the term 'QoS' very loosely on purpose. Some of you must be thinking 'what do you mean, layer 2 QoS? Layer 3 QoS? Wired? Wireless?' My response is one word to all of that – 'exactly!'
Indeed, QoS is not a simple subject. Those who have studied up on QoS, in its various forms, know what I mean. It requires careful thought about both layers 2 and 3 and how it maps between each medium AND even between networking layers/hops. All it takes is one misconfigured network hop and your lovely end-to-end QoS is ruined. Oh, then you have to carefully inspect your application to ensure it is marking traffic appropriately - assuming it is properly designed and can mark traffic at all. BTW, I’m conveniently not even going to talk about the WAN and service provider issues. Then, when you get into split-MAC architectures that use WLAN controllers it is even more complex.
So, let’s get back to our acronym. The 'V' in VoWiFi (Voice over Wi-Fi) isn’t just for 'voice' anymore. The 'V' really should start to form a mental picture in your head to mean video or voice – perhaps both. I think we really need to be more precise though because it can’t just mean both. 'VoFi' is a name of a WLAN analysis product. We can’t use another term like 'multimedia' because that was just so 90s. 'Triple-play' is such a sales-person / boardroom term for people who wouldn’t know the difference between a (insert funny non-techy comparison here).
Consider 'VVoWiFi.' Hear me out. The main reason being, what is also carried in a video conversation? Bingo! A 'voice' media stream. We as engineers need to mark them separately, place them in different QoS queues and ultimately ensure they meet our end-user’s performance expectations. I also implore you that we absolutely need to engineer them into our system-wide engineering architecture as an inseparable group – not just for voice.
I think I see the need for a new Wi-Fi certification in the future. Folks, video is coming your way and it just might come faster than you think.
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