究竟会视频会议意味着你的网络？

慢慢地，静静地，几乎，它的增长 - 网络上的视频流量。我说的不是流视频，网络直播，或YouTube冲浪。我说的是一个不同的野兽 - 双向视频会议。在边角处的小伙子们看到绿色时，他们谈论这一点 - 无论是在美元（或英镑或欧元）以及较低的碳足迹。我是一个天生的未来学家，和我视频通信的一个巨大的风扇。这是很简单的通信技术，我们已经建立好多年的自然进程。和IP网络的普及是什么事情让这个未来的主要发展步骤可能。只是有几个技术问题需要解决。而且，哦，是的，我们可能只需要添加一点点更多的带宽？举个例子来说，视频会议的顶端 - 被称为“网真”解决方案。为了让企业能够完全接受和利用网真作为一个有效的工具，思科告诉我，他们的研究表明，它是必不可少的视频达到1080p的分辨率，这意味着要确保5兆位/秒连接。 At lower resolutions, they claim that the human “connection experience” drops off significantly, and so will the likelihood that people will use it as a fully capable alternative to live, face-to-face contact. Cisco has some practical experience with this – they have deployed this extensively internally, in a grand “we eat our own dog food” experiment, with some really positive results. Now, you won’t need a high res telepresence suite everywhere, and so you may be able to handle this, or you may be willing to live with lower resolutions. My own experience with a 720p system was still very good, and very lifelike. At the other end of video conferencing spectrum is where we are ultimately headed – ubiquitous desktop video conferencing. And here, there is not the same level of expectation for high res and personal contact, so lower resolutions are just fine. I had a fascinating conversation with Avistar, who is trying to answer this ubiquity challenge. Their approach is that for this to work, they have to make their solution “network aware”, so that they offer, provision, and assure specific variable qualities of service each time a new session gets set up. Great idea, and they are onto something – the videoconferencing system should not blindly assume that adequate resources are available everytime a session is going to be set up. Avistar lacks a real-time aspect to their network awareness (at least for today), but they are on the right track. Starting next month, EMA will be conducting research on best practices for integrating voice and video over IP management into enterprise operations. If you would like to participate, please drop me a line at jfrey@emausa.com and I’ll put you on the list, and send you a copy of the results.