The history of videophones, part 2

Videophones, present and future

The problem that the video phones pioneers came up against was that the telephone system was designed to carry voice communications only. A whole new infrastructure had to be put in to support a video telephone system -- esoteric equipment such as local loops, terminals, branch exchanges, switches -- had to be redesigned in order to carry the new medium over the existing telephone system. The results was a reasonably efficient carrier for analogue signals translating black and white pictures of a similar type for those used in conventional television broadcasts. The difference unfortunately was that the copper wire used to carry the video signals was simply not up to the task, something which haunts telephone engineers even today. As a consequence the picture could only be very small, no more than an 5 1/2 by 5 inches, in monochrome, and quality was not really terribly good so despite considerable time and investment the take-up by the general public was too small to be a realistic proposition so the whole project was canned towards the end of the 1970s.

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Time has passed, technology has improved and we now have videophones which can transmit highly compressed digital signals over the telephone network in order to provide full colour pictures. Unfortunately most of us are still stuck with copper wire media which simply cannot carry the large bandwidths that's a really high definition system demands and so progress appears to have come to something of a crossroads. On one side telecommunication engineers are trying very hard to squeeze more and more data down a thin copper wire, and on the other side video producers are setting up more sophisticated communication and teleconferencing systems which rely upon not only multiple cameras and state of the art video compression techniques but also fibre optic broadband systems which unfortunately have been very sadly mishandled in the past in the UK. At the moment the concept of being able to talk to someone over the telephone on the other side of the world whilst looking at a high fidelity real-time image of that person is still something we will have to look forward to in the future.

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