Great article which I think hits most of the issues and options associated with Videoconferencing.
 
One aspect it misses is engineered bandwidth and associated cost. Higher end solutions delivering reliable high-quality are run over networks that can guaranteed the bandwidth needed for consistently high audio/video quality and low delay. This consists of either private dedicated lines or reserved bandwidth with network devices which ensure no other traffic detracts from that needed to ensure quality of the conferencing.
 
With these types of solutions, the reserved or dedicated bandwidth is usually the bulk of the cost.
 
My most recent experience with this was when Dennis Raimondi worked for a company selling solutions like this a year or so back. It’s an interesting niche and larger companies pay a significant amount to get crystal-clear, reliable video conferencing.
 
Within a corporate local area and wide area network, companies will use higher-end routers and switches to enable similar high-quality audio and video conferences within their network. In this case, the companies are already paying for the bandwidth within and between their offices and it is an incremental investment to upgrade network devices to reserve and guarantee conferencing bandwidth. They can save phone charges and even travel charges through reliable, high-quality conferencing.
 
Our experiences point out the key difficulty in VOIP (voice-over-IP) and video over the Internet. The Internet is not managed nor can bandwidth be reserved and the quality essential for voice and video ensured. There are huge obstacles and issues to scale even private networks to deliver broadcast quality video to millions of viewers. Doing so over the Internet is farther off. This is something I think people gloss over in the net neutrality debate: a neutral network cannot guarantee quality of service.
 
FYI, most of our commercial phone calls today actually do go over data networks. However, these are private, managed networks in which the required network conditions for quality can be ensured. It’s essentially the creation of a virtual end to end phone line which is actually composed of data packets over a data network. On the Internet the quality is at the whims of the Internet weather of the moment along the whole path.