Video calling has gone mainstream: It’s now as common as traditional phone calls once were, often replacing them in both personal and professional communications. Apps like Zoom, Facetime, WhatsApp and Microsoft Teams are woven into the fabric of our everyday lives. Not only that, but video calling has become a crucial technology for bringing remote colleagues together and getting real-time feedback.
In just a few decades’ time, the internet has made it possible to chat, call or videoconference with friends, family and colleagues anywhere in the world that has an internet connection. But few people stop to think about the infrastructure that makes real-time video communication so easy. Without the right underlying infrastructure, users could experience audio or video problems, sync errors, lag, dropped calls or screen sharing difficulties.
Behind the scenes of our video calls, there’s crucial physical infrastructure consisting of servers, storage and networking equipment, as well as software applications and services that keep everything running smoothly.
A short history: The inventions that led to video calling
Just over a hundred years after the invention of the telephone, the modern internet was born, and it quickly became a foundational communication technology. In the 1990s, as internet access was becoming more widespread, the webcam was invented. This made video calling on personal computers possible by the early 2000s. Skype was launched in 2003, and later that decade, smartphones with front-facing cameras came along, enabling the dedicated video calling apps we’re familiar with today. Facetime launched in 2010, and before long, video calling was commercially accessible on consumer mobile devices.
Even before internet use was prevalent, as far back as the 1960s, businesses and governments were experimenting with forms of videoconferencing. While the first commercial videoconferencing products didn’t gain widespread adoption, the technology improved over the next few decades, and multipoint conferencing interoperability standards arose. As internet use expanded, corporate video calling also went mainstream, taking advantage of the same technologies developed for consumer use.
The global pandemic that began in 2020 greatly accelerated adoption of video calling for both consumers and businesses. Apps like Zoom exploded in popularity, and many new video calling companies came to market. Today, the market continues to evolve: AI enhancements are being integrated into many services, along with augmented and virtual reality, and advanced collaboration tools. In addition, 5G network expansion supports ultra-low latency and high-definition video transmission around the world.
Throughout the history of communication technologies, there’s always been a vital infrastructure supporting it—from the copper wires used for early telephony to modern fiber optic cables that enable the internet; from data storage systems to the servers processing audio and video data.
A deeper dive into video calling: What’s happening behind the scenes?
When most of us join a Zoom call or Facetime our family and friends, we don’t think much about the technology that makes it possible. But there’s important infrastructure that enables seamless video calling for users across great distances. For real-time video calls, video delivery needs to happen very quickly, which requires high bandwidth, low latency connectivity. Video calling software providers need infrastructure in edge locations (close to their users) to effectively manage calls and process video data with low latency.
There are many components that make video calling a reality, as well as various ways to connect to video calls.
User devices
The most basic requirements for users are personal devices like smartphones and laptop computers with integrated cameras and microphones. These devices are where a video calling app runs.
Software
Video calling software applications like Facetime, Google Meet and WhatsApp—or, on the business side, Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Cisco Webex—deliver video calling services to users. These video calling software providers have coding and infrastructure in place to determine how they want to send video and how to deliver it quickly. A codec is an encoding/decoding algorithm that compresses data to enable speed and high quality without sending full-size files. For example, they might use coding that enables them to send background data less often than face data, since the background doesn’t change as quickly.
Networking
Networking is the heart and soul of what makes smooth video calls happen, regardless of the user location. Video calling software providers can transmit video signals in a couple of different ways:
- Point-to-point (P2P) communication, such as Facetime, is a direct channel between two devices.
- Multipoint communication means a channel is shared among multiple devices or nodes.
These companies rely on networking equipment and services for their video calling technology. Networking enables connectivity between the video calling application providers, ISPs and end users.
The critical networking infrastructure includes physical and virtual appliances, such as:
- Switches, which connect user devices to local networks
- Routers, which direct traffic between local networks and the internet
- Firewalls, which secure networks by controlling incoming and outcoming traffic
There’s also the physical infrastructure that enables video traffic to travel between remote participants, data centers and clouds. This includes:
- Fiber optic cables, which carry data using pulses of light
- Subsea cables, which transmit data between continents
The networking infrastructure also includes connectivity services provided by public internet providers, mobile carriers and internet exchange services that directly connect providers inside a data center. These participants can exchange data with one another privately using direct physical cross connects.
Servers and storage
Besides networking equipment, video calling also requires servers with significant compute capacity to manage call setup, participants and other details, all while processing real-time video. A multipoint control unit (MCU) is a video transcoding server that facilitates videoconferences and calls involving multiple participants.
Video calls also require data storage devices to hold recordings and logs, and to cache data to help with ensuring a seamless video feed.
The role of data centers
Much of the compute, storage and networking infrastructure that enables video calling resides in data centers, whether that’s private on-premises data centers, colocation facilities or public clouds.
Data centers are also the place where participants in a video calling ecosystem can meet and exchange value. For instance, they offer internet exchange points where ISPs can exchange data destined for their networks. So, when a user in one part of the world connects through their internet provider or mobile carrier to a user in another part of the world, with a different ISP or mobile carrier, that data can be exchanged along the shortest, fastest route possible via an internet exchange.
When a business is growing quickly, it needs a fast, easy way to build out infrastructure to support that growth. Even before the pandemic, Zoom was expanding and needed a way to quickly enter new markets during a season of rapid growth. They leveraged the extensive Equinix colocation footprint to increase their worldwide presence, along with Equinix Fabric® for private connectivity and Equinix Internet Exchange for scalable network peering aggregation across their global carriers. Now the largest video calling app by market share, Zoom is continuing to partner with Equinix to host vital infrastructure for their video communications platform.
Read the case studyThere’s no video calling without infrastructure
Whether it’s a simple video call between two friends or a complex videoconference with many users in many locations, a lot of infrastructure is required for seamless video calling experiences. As video conferencing solutions are enhanced with more AI-powered services in the future, even more infrastructure will be necessary.
Video calling application providers need to put infrastructure where their users are and replicate that infrastructure in new places. Equinix makes this easy, with 260+ data centers around the world. Because of our rich ecosystem of network service providers, companies can keep latency to a minimum for users by routing calls to their nearest point of presence (PoP). Through Equinix Internet Exchange, they can explore private and public peering, connecting video providers to clouds, content delivery networks and ISPs or other network services. For those needing to bypass the public internet, such as video calling providers and their business customers, Equinix Fabric offers secure, private interconnection.
Learn more about the opportunities that edge computing presents: Read our white paper Where edge meets AI opportunity.
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