The Future of Collaboration
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Bell Labs Consulting Work from Home (WFH) – the future of collaboration White paper Remote video collaboration is the new normal for enterprises, schools, even doctor visits and social gatherings. The social/financial/emotional ramifications of this are not yet well understood, with some companies declaring “WFH forever,” while others are experiencing employee emotional disconnection and declining productivity. Research studies are exposing the limits of traditional collaboration tools, describing the fatigue and emotional disconnection felt by participants. Critical parlance emerged for all- day conferencing sessions, terms such as “Zoombies” and Zoom fatigue or exhaustion. Given the expected protracted (or permanent) nature of remote interactions, significant innovation that can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of remote collaboration is emerging. This paper investigates the role of the network in improving collaboration, as well as the impact of emerging “immersive collaboration” tools on network design and optimization. Finally, we discuss the opportunities for operators to support these key applications and the network optimizations that are needed to enable a better user experience. Bell Labs Consulting Contents Introduction 3 Network aspects of collaboration 4 OTT CPaaS providers 7 Emergence of immersive collaboration 9 Future of immersive collaboration 12 What’s the opportunity for CSPs? 14 Conclusion 16 Learn more 16 Abbreviations 16 References 17 2 White paper Work from Home (WFH) – the future of collaboration Bell Labs Consulting Introduction Internet-based conferencing and collaboration tools have become household names—Zoom, MS Teams and Webex followed by a host of less well-known platforms like 8x8, Highfive, eZuce and others. Zoom has claimed much of the recognition during the 2020 COVID-19 mandated lockdowns with 300 million daily active participants . A host of acquisitions related to conferencing applications have occurred during this year of COVID-19; Verizon acquired BlueJeans in April; Dialpad acquired Highfive; CoreDial acquired eZuce; and Microsoft and Google have reportedly tried to purchase Zoom. Besides Verizon, other operators provide conferencing and traditional collaboration solutions; Jio launched the JioMeet application and had 50 million downloads since its July 2020 release. The market for conferencing and collaboration tools is reportedly at $16B1, with about three billion of this video-hardware related. While the video conferencing and collaboration (VCC) market is flourishing, the current tools are limited by the device form factors—flat screens, limited viewing angles, content resolution—but importantly also by the network. Sociological studies have shown that current collaboration tools can inhibit participation for some, exhaust others and even contribute to confusion. The Wall Street Journal reports that productivity has taken a hit with remote collaboration, and training new workers is a struggle—some HR executives claiming it will not be sustainable2. In the remote first world we live in, the ability to remain effective and productive while using VCC tools has become more critical. Renewed interest and investments into alternative communication platforms based on augmented, mixed and virtual reality (VR) have surged. VR collaboration companies such as Spatial networks create 3D collaboration spaces with avatars, streamed video, virtual white boards, etc. to enable more natural (effective) meeting and collaboration sessions; during COVID-19 lockdown they opened their platform to non-paying participants. Bell Labs Consulting expects that innovation funding for new forms of collaboration will grow rapidly, leveraging 5G and edge cloud capabilities. This paper looks at the role of the network in relieving video conferencing fatigue and ways in which communications service providers (CSPs) can participate in this critical market. It is clear that VCC could be a pivotal battleground for CSPs as value creation becomes a key profitability challenge in the 5G era. Surrendering video telephony to over-the-top (OTT) communication platform as a service (CPaaS) providers will continue to relegate the CSP as a utility provider. The opportunity exists for CSPs to act as retailers in provision of conferencing services, offering end- to-end solutions as Verizon has done through the BlueJeans acquisition, or as wholesalers addressing network-related quality of service for CPaaS providers. CSPs are better suited to solve several technological limitations to current OTT CPaaS solutions. Multi-party collaboration is multicast by nature (one to many), and the replication of HD video in real time at line rate is a challenge that operators can solve with distributed IP edge gear or distributed edge cloud/multi-access edge computing (MEC). Today CPaaS providers are building out their private networks to improve user experience through engineered and optimized routes. This is both an opportunity and threat for the CSPs as CPaaS providers cannot achieve a reliable communications service without a distributed footprint. While today’s collaboration problems are challenging, moving toward immersive collaboration will be much more demanding of the network. The ability to have a distributed footprint will be key for immersive experiences—today’s OTT solutions may have a handful of hosting locations in a country as large as the US. The commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) servers used for replication of video collaboration traffic will not 1 GSMA intelligence, The Zoom boom: surge in video conferencing sharpens operators minds 2 https://www.wsj.com/articles/companies-start-to-think-remote-work-isnt-so-great-after-all-11595603397 3 White paper Work from Home (WFH) – the future of collaboration Bell Labs Consulting scale efficiently and an SDN-type solution will be needed to leave the bearer processing toward purpose- built hardware and service control at the server layer. Inevitably the CSP must architect a VCC solution that provides OTT flexibility while leveraging the CSP assets and expertise in network optimization and quality. Network aspects of collaboration While the market for VCC platforms continues to grow, there are several challenges with today’s video- based platforms that lead to poor user experience. Research shows that we work hard to process non- verbal cues like facial expressions, tone and pitch of the voice and body language 3. The additional effort accumulated over multiple video conferences throughout a workday can take its toll on our concentration and lead to a mental fatigue (Zoom fatigue). The difficulty in recognizing these cues can be attributed to the unnatural format of multiparty calls with tiled video thumbnails displayed on our 15-inch laptops, but also audio lag (or delay) creates an unnatural rhythm to the conversation. Lag contributes to challenges in gaining the “floor” in large parties or conversation collisions dissuading discussion and further exacerbating Zoom fatigue. The network requirement for effective collaboration is determined by client devices, their location and application objectives. Ultimately, end-user quality of experience (QoE) will be the key measure driving network requirements. As mentioned, Zoom fatigue is attributable to several factors, including lack of adequate network resources. Audio and video synchronization is often an artifact of network quality, and poor video resolution is a result of bandwidth. Delayed audio impacts interactivity between participants, amongst other challenges. We captured the network bandwidth of a Zoom four-party call upstream and downstream as shown in Figure 1. Figure 1. Observed Zoom bandwidth during four-party call ontream uer 3 ) s uer bp M 2 ( h t o part d i w d n a B 1 ptream 0 40 80 120 ime (ec) The downstream bandwidth illustrates how bandwidth increases as each participant joins the call. Secondly the upstream bandwidth on the Zoom call is roughly 1 Mb/s, which is a low-quality 720p video (typical OTT 720p videos are 1.5–2.0 Mb/s). MS Teams was recorded as producing about twice this bandwidth upstream (~2 .0 Mb/s). While these bandwidth requirements are easily met with today’s wireline networks, this is not the case with mobile networks. 3 https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200421-why-zoom-video-chats-are-so-exhausting 4 White paper Work from Home (WFH) – the future of collaboration Bell Labs Consulting For mobile participants, typical LTE upstream busy hour bandwidth is in the 500–600 kb/s range, implying that the conferencing client would need to decrease the encoding rate, resulting in a degraded picture. While conferencing works well enough today, we maintain that improvements in network latency, bandwidth and jitter will improve overall user QoE. The ITU (G.107) recommends 100 ms for conversational speech, but we regularly have 200–300 ms delays in international conversations. Research shows that jitter (variable latency) can make audio indiscernible at 200 ms4. To solve network quality challenges, many OTT collaboration providers are leveraging the browser-based technology Web Real Time Communications (WebRTC), which incorporates an adaptable bearer to deal with changing network conditions. WebRTC is a framework of protocols for signaling, security, encoding and transport, so that the web application can easily establish a communication channel to one or more endpoints. One of the key technologies is called SVC scalable video CODEC (SVC), which creates a layered encoded video where the base layer