Northern adds data/voice/video by phone line

Electronic News, June 15, 1992 by Andrew Collier

NEW YORK--In another telecom industry stab at promoting communications applications at the desktop, Northern Telecom Ltd. last week introduced a product that combines data, voice and video for transmission over telephone lines.

Launched by Edward Lucente, Northern Telecom's executive vice president, in a telephone call with Apple's chairman, John Sculley, the new product, called Visit, will reside on both IBM-compatible 386 and 486 machines and Apple Corp.'s Macintosh II family, and will be capable of operating between the two systems.

Visit consists of software, a camera, a video circuit board and related communications hardware, and costs between $2,900 and $3,500, depending on the configuration. Its use requires dial-up Switched 56 telephone service and an ordinary phone line, both accessed via the PBX.

The software package for controlling voice calls can be purchased separately for $99. Both products will be generally available in the fourth quarter.

The technology was developed in cooperation with Workstation Technologies Inc. (WTI), Irvine, Calif. It uses a coder-decoder board consisting of a Motorola 68030 microprocessor, a front-end analog to digital converter, and 1 megabit of memory. Compression is approximately 140 to one, but WTI executives at the briefing wouldn't state the precise figure. The board, which fits in the ISA or NuBus slot, produces a video image at 10 to 15 frames-per-second.

Next year, Northern will migrate the package to the H.261 standard, and is testing codecs from a number of vendors, including Motorola and Intel, but not AT&T. Also to be added are a $1,000 daughterboard that will add color.

Northern Telecom executives stressed that Visit is best for sharing files and voice calls over the phone, and is not a substitute for high-end videoconferencing systems offered by companies like PictureTel and Compression Labs Inc., for example. Northern expects that market, hwever, to generate sales of 200,000 to 300,000 units in the next 18 months, according to Gerry Butters, Northern's executive vice president, sales and service.

Visit marks Northern Telecom's entrance into the multimedia market, although a glimpse of the product surfaced during a demo at the Apple booth at MacWorld earlier this year.

With Visit, customers would use Northern Telecom software to transmit files and pictures over phone lines attached to the PC or Mac, instead of sending the data over a LAN to the wide area network. LANs were among the main factors which several years ago prevented the telecom industry from fully realizing a drive to provide PBXs as office hubs and data switching mechanisms.

Confusion may arise as users send messages locally over LANs using one software package, and transmit data, voice and images to distant locations using another software package.

Northern Telecom executives said they are working on that problem by developing a software package that would reside on the server and decide when to route traffic over phone or LAN lines.

Although the system is compatible with IBM PCs, IBM's Tokyo subsidiary is developing a PC-based videophone with GC Technology Inc., a Tokyo chip maker. IBM also has the backing of Nippon elegraph & Telephone Corp.