An overview of videoconferencing technology

Videoconferencing has progressed from being an expensive system used only by large corporations, to units which rapidly are becoming commodity items. This progress has been due to developments in terminal equipment, transports, and standards. This paper presents an overview of the latest developments and technology trends for group and desktop videoconferencing systems, and for circuit switched and packet switched transports. This paper also includes developments in multipoint and inverse multiplexing technologies and also presents an overview of the salient ITU-T standards for videoconferencing.