India Broadband

India Broadband

Looking back through my collection of old stories, I find that back in 1998 hopes were high for teleconferencing. In particular, Canon had a system it called CanoMedia. To run this, at each end of your connection you needed a Pentium 90 (ah, the nostalgia!) equipped with a special plug-in board (which actually did most of the processing work that would otherwise have overwhelmed the poor old Pentium), a camera, and one of those conference call microphone/speaker gadgets that have since 1998 become pretty commonplace in most offices.

No doubt this would have been a lot more successful if it hadn't been for the vital shared component, a dedicated ISDN connection linking the two parties (multi-way teleconferencing was not mentioned) and that it was far from cheap. I never saw an installed CanoMedia system outside Canon's office.

Times change and technology marches on. Not least among the benefits we can hope for from local loop unbundling is faster internet service.

But Jaron Burbidge of Tandberg reckons the speed we've got now is sufficient for his company's dedicated IP-based teleconferencing systems to work well. Since January he has been Tandberg's New Zealand area manager, operating from an office in Auckland's PWC Tower.

His business card is the first I've seen that includes an IP address for a video connection. He's a special case and I wouldn't put money on seeing many more video IP addresses on business cards. But I do expect to see more video conferencing around the place than before.

It might as well be Tandberg's product too, as the company certainly has the gear. The primary demonstration device * you can't push teleconferencing without a demo * was the 7000 MXP, a boardroom-dominating giant that puts two 30-inch widescreen LCD displays next to each other on a pedestal with a remotely-operated panning, tilting, zooming camera on top and a heap of fancy software to divide up the screens as needed.

Tandberg claims the 7000 MXP can handle six video and five audio streams simultaneously but I don't know if our broadband speeds are ready for that yet. As I've mentioned before, our standard broadband services won't run even consumer devices like Apple's OS X computers, current versions of which can do simple videoconferencing between four parties if you're living in the right country.

But Tandberg has plenty of extra equipment to smooth the videoconferencing experience * gateways, border controllers, media processing systems, content servers and much more, plus dedicated software to make it all go.

Eight years ago I noted that the CanoMedia system wasn't quite full-motion video, although the sound was good.

Tandberg has moved things along since then and the quality it achieves is now much closer to standard TV. And facilities for sharing PowerPoint presentations and the like are part of the package too.

Did I say the 7000 MXP is a giant? Well it is, but Tandberg's really big model, the 8000 MXP, is pretty much the same thing, but with a pair of 50-inch plasma screens instead of the 30-inch LCDs.

Considering how much a single domestic 50-inch plasma screen costs, a price for the whole system of around $80,000 is really quite reasonable.

(To see what else Tandberg has, point your browser to Tandberg.net. Tandberg. com takes you to Tandberg Data, a different branch of the business, which handles data storage devices.)

Down at the low end (around $1500) there's the 150 MXP, which has an 8.4-inch LCD screen and is in effect a small-footprint desktop videophone, suitable for general deployment throughout a business. It works just as well as the 7000 MXP, although on a more intimate scale. Every desk should have one, even (or perhaps especially) desks of employees working from home.

Mr Burbidge says Tandberg is setting up a network of channel partners within New Zealand, and his role is to plant a flag here for a company that has up to now relied on distribution from Australia.

Unbundling and its expected service improvements has been a stroke of good fortune: "The timing is perfect in some ways," he says. "Now IP is a reality, and we've got firewall traversal technology that gets around barriers between businesses.

"Also teleworking makes more sense than ever, with a little videoconferencing system installed in home offices.

"Realistic bandwidth opens up new market opportunities for us * videoconferencing doesn't have to involve large expensive systems" * although I don't doubt that Tandberg would be very happy to sell 7000 MXPs to anyone who can afford one * "but it can be pushed right out to the desktops of the organisation so everyone can use it routinely.

"IP will drive the next generation of video. For us, that means videoconferencing can be made more reliable and easier to use than ever.

"Our systems not only connect for face-to-face conversation but they also integrate with tools such as Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook. You can schedule meetings in Outlook and have them automatically connected between branch offices anywhere in the world.

"And unlike videoconferencing systems in the past, this just works * without needing any attention from the IT department."