[LINK] Telco Trivia

[rchirgwin at ozemail.com.au]

Paul Brooks wrote:
> Marghanita da Cruz wrote:
>> Paul Brooks wrote:
>>> Because it will shortly be Friday....
>>>
>>> http://www.totaltele.com/View.aspx?ID=93870&t=2&en=1
>>>
>>> Managers take calls in their PJs, survey shows. Plus other strange 
>>> stories from the past seven days in telecoms, including bathroom 
>>> bungles and beauty basics.
>> <snip>
>>
>> Not so strange, if you are calling Toronto or New York from Sydney - 
>> it can be midnight here and 8am there!
> Certainly - it wasn't the aspect of taking calls at home in pyjamas 
> that caught my eye, it was the pushback on video-enabled calling.
> Much of the activity and debate on broadband connectivity and services 
> in the industry at the moment seems to have a built-in assumption that 
> all broadband has to have enough capacity for some sort of video feed, 
> justified usually by video-phones and video-enabled teleconferencing 
> or IPTV. I've used elements of this myself in my current work, whether 
> it is on the topic of IP network QoS, future of VoIP, or working on 
> VDSL2.
>
> Often these discussions and debates ignore human factors and 
> preferences, which are highlighted in the news snippet - there are 
> times when video capability is not only optional, but also 
> deliberately NOT required or desirable.
Technology designers frequently fall into the old trap of imagining a 
target user who, on close inspection, looks identical to the designer. 
And if enough of the insiders agree that they represent the perfect 
target users, then they will do very well at designing services that are 
absolutely perfect for the in-crowd of true believers.

As someone who uses iChat for work purposes, file transfer is much more 
useful than the video capability, which almost never gets used.

Also: if you're in a room with someone, their small idiosyncrasies of 
body language and facial movement don't really intrude on the 
conversation: the "space" around the conversation acts as a buffer, so 
that if someone (like me, I know it's a bad habit) pulls a face while 
they're thinking or distracted, it doesn't necessarily get interpreted 
as commentary on the conversation. If you have two video cameras at each 
end of the link, and two faces pretty much filling up the image, what 
you get instead is that people are much more sensitive to things they 
ignore face-to-face - even when people know each other quite well.

Video is in my experience somewhat confining in conversation: you have 
to pay more attention to yourself, and to a relatively small square of 
screen space to maintain eye contact, and it really doesn't map that 
well onto ordinary conversational habits.

(But we only say that kind of stuff in private, I suppose, because 
nobody wants to hear that the Great Killer Application for Extremely 
Fast Broadband for All might eat itself...)

RC
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