10.1 Introduction

Due to the ease with which applications can be developed, the Internet has created a revolution in the telecommunications and computing industries. Combined with the rapid growth in the use of personal computers and their inherent ability to conveniently access the Internet, interest has turned to enabling more dynamic applications and, in particular, those offering real-time conversational multimedia capabilities. However, to be able to widely deploy these applications in a useful way, it is necessary to have a common set of specifications for media transport, call signalling, and the like. These have to be defined as international standards, to allow equipment and services to be designed for a global market place, as discussed in Chapter 5. This chapter describes one such standard developed by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) H.323. It provides an overview of H.323, charts its development and highlights the areas that are currently under development.

As mentioned in Chapter 5, the H.323 standard has been developed alongside other H. series standards within Study Group 16 (SG16) of the ITU. The people who contribute to the development of the standard come from a wide range of companies, including network equipment suppliers, terminal equipment suppliers, communications stack and application developers, service providers and network operators.

Occasionally portrayed as a mammoth and complex protocol, H.323 is actually a comprehensive framework capable of constructing a wide range of conversational multimedia and communications solutions. It has been defined to enable voice, data...