Abstract:

In May 1991 six European telecommunications companies agreed to develop a European-wide videophone service, promoting the use of international standards (ITU: H.320), through the European Video telephony (EV) programme. The main part of the programme consisted of a large scale trial. In this trial each participating country distributed about 50 ISDN videophones over a selected number of companies. The results of this trial will be presented in this paper. There were two main objectives in the EV trial. The first objective was a purely technical one. By setting up an international videophone network it was possible to: 1) test the maturity of the technology; 2) test the performance of the equipment and the networks; 3) test the interworking between countries, ISDN and PSTN, terminals of different manufacturers and PBX exchanges; and 4) to learn from the technical organisation of such a large trial. The other main objective was a more social or marketing one. The trial aimed at: 1) discovering the added value of using videotelephony, 2) the identification of new applications and 3) to learn how to introduce this technology within organisations and companies. In the following sections we will focus mainly on the social or marketing objectives.