Bandwidth, which is really a range of frequencies, can be expressed in units - such as, thousands of bits per second (kbps) or millions of bits per second (Mbps). If you've read How Cell Phones Work, you know that, although modern cell phones are digital mechanisms, they send information over radio signals and only have a limited amount of bandwidth with which to work. So, a cell phone with video conferencing needs to be able to send and receive a large amount of information. The major challenge to transmitting digital video is that it requires sending a great deal of data - much more data than audio requires. But the popularity of texting, which is equally as hazardous, eliminated this doubt, and major cell phone companies now are equipping cell phones with the feature and beefing up networks.
It was once thought that people wouldn't be interested in video conferencing cell phones because they couldn't use them on the move (in other words, they'd be walking down the sidewalk bumping into people or lampposts while they tried to use the feature). Is 3G technology lifting the videophone from the ashes? Read on to find out. With advanced technology and the popularity of the cell phone, the old underdog video telephony has emerged again. Webcams enable users to engage in video conversations over a personal computer. Nonetheless, by the 21st century, people started to embrace a similar technology - webcams. You can talk to someone before you've had your morning shower or even in your underwear. One of the things people like about a purely audio phone conversation is that you don't have to worry how you look. It seems people simply didn't care to add a visual to their phone calls - in fact they preferred no visual at all. Many speculate another factor contributed to the videophone's historic flops. Why buy an expensive toy that you can never use? In the end, it was a vicious cycle - no one was buying it because no one else was buying it. The problem with the videophone was that it was only useful for the purchaser if his or her friends and family members also owned videophones. Compression hurt the quality of both the video and the audio, and the product failed to impress consumers. Instead of three wires, it only used one, which meant it had to compress both the audio and video data (a process we'll discuss in detail later).
AT&T tried again with a different video conferencing phone in 1992, called the Videophone 2500. The Picturephone's hefty price (not to mention its hefty size) prevented it from flying off shelves.
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