Whose Network To Use?
Before you consider adding telepresence traffic to your corporate WAN, you need to be able to answer “yes” to the following questions:
If you have to say “no” to any of these questions, but your execs have already decided that you are implementing telepresence, then you will probably want to start with a managed telepresence service, or at least engage a service provider with a focus on telepresence to provide the links.
All the answers are not yet in on how to run this high-demand traffic across a converged network and keep all the applications happy. And remember, any performance problems you encounter will be displayed, as they occur, on 50-inch plasma screens to your top management.
Conclusion
The telepresence market is still very young, but all the vendors are reporting high interest, and high utilization of the systems that have been installed at customer sites and within their own companies.
Many of the usability and quality concerns that dogged traditional room-based videoconferencing systems have been overcome in telepresence. The new systems have bigger screens, lower latency, higher quality spatial audio, better attention to room details (color, lighting, etc.) and a focus on ease of use that should please many users—especially those who know first-hand how hard traditional videoconferencing can be. And there is this hard-to-describe immersive quality, which really makes the experience work.
Unfortunately, we also have the usual early market problem of proprietary systems, notably those from Cisco, HP and Teliris, that don’t interoperate. Polycom and Tandberg have standards-based systems that will talk to each other, and Tandberg is working with HP to make their systems interconnect, albeit not fully at this time.
Despite these obstacles, the vendors tout their interest in business-to-business telepresence, and how they are working to support it (at least between their own customers). Today, for example, customers of Teliris can quickly arrange a business-to-business call. The Teliris network is designed to open a secure MPLS tunnel between the two companies for the duration of a scheduled call, and then close it up again to maintain security once the call completes.
The vendors will have to make major business and technical efforts if they want to offer an interoperable business-to-business telepresence capability. Expensive travel, environmental woes, terrorist threats and other worries would suggest there is a growing market for such systems. However, even if the vendors do not move in this direction, telepresence is already a great step forward from room-based videoconferencing.
John Bartlett is a consultant and VP with NetForecast, specializing in data and real-time application performance on enterprise networks and the Internet.
