Cisco Telepresence - the facts

Further to my last post which is about the impact of HD TV on the network - see below a video which is about Cisco's Telepresence which provides an transformational improvement on traditional Video Conferencing.

http://www.twitvid.com/19B5B

I have had the opportunity to participate in a number of Telepresence meetings recently - the last was between three end points Glasgow, Bangalore and Sydney. The experience was as close as it could be to us all being together in the same room! I am afraid that you simply have to experience this to realise who true this is!

Of course for this to work you do need a pretty solid network with a need to support a minimum of 8 Mbps in each direction for each video stream. And to setup conference is a simple as scheduling a meeting in Outlook with a press of one button on the day to initiate the session.

One interesting feature is that the voice channel working in full duplex - which means that anyone can speak at any time and will be heard by all. That is a significant departure from H.323 based VC system where the voice is usual simplex ( one direction at a time ) which is necessary to eliminate audio feed back which is caused by the latency of such systems!!!