Multi-Point video conferencing

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Capodecina
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Multipoint video conferencing

Do any of you have any experience with multi-point video conferencing solutions?

If so how do you handle bridging the connections?

Who provides the bridging service for you?

Do you own your equipment?

Do you use ISDN or IP?
 
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Wardie said:
Do any of you have any experience with multi-point video conferencing solutions?

Some, my Org uses it lots

If so how do you handle bridging the connections?

We use seperate ADSL of SDSL with Cisco routers to forward the correct service or port (not sure exactly on this part)

Who provides the bridging service for you?

No one, we do it ourselves as we can host multi site confernces with our kit

Do you own your equipment?

Yes

Do you use ISDN or IP?

IP over ADSL/SDSL
Click to expand...
 
Pretty much the same as Mr.Bond.
The Tandberg VC units we use are capable of having a multi-site conference just by adding another destination(Read: IP) to the call. This is all done by IP over SDSL.
 
Currently evaluating Microsoft's Communications Server - does multi-point video conferencing and a whole lot more - take a look if you're willing to pay for a tried and tested solution and work in a AD based environment.

We've also tried OpenMeetings, available through Google Code. Tis' a very good bit of kit, but a pita to setup and very buggy - but it's flaws are offset against the great price - free :)
 
Not really used massively, typically just for meeting rooms rather than desk to desk video stuff.

Deanje - What sort of bandwidth requirements and technical knowledge is required for that?

Have any of you heard of these?

http://www.mvision.co.uk
 
Last company did it using a system which could do VoIP or over ISDN lines.

The system itself could handle dialing multiple locations, but with ISDN the quality of each site deteriorated as you added more people due to having a limited number of lines for it to use (think we had 3 ISDN2 lines to give 6 channels).
 
Deanje said:
Pretty much the same as Mr.Bond.
The Tandberg VC units we use are capable of having a multi-site conference just by adding another destination(Read: IP) to the call. This is all done by IP over SDSL.
Click to expand...

We also use Tandberg kit but I've never been involved with it, really must take a look sometime :)

Some of the screens though are huge things.
 
Wardie said:
Not really used massively, typically just for meeting rooms rather than desk to desk video stuff.

Deanje - What sort of bandwidth requirements and technical knowledge is required for that?

Have any of you heard of these?

http://www.mvision.co.uk
Click to expand...

Bandwidth usage is fairly minimal, to be honest. We've got the video quality capped at 1Mbit, but it adapts based on line quality afaik. Ours usually connects with a video quality of not even half that, which produces acceptable results on a 50'' Plasma.
We do have QoS set up to favour the VC traffic, but it doesn't really kick in as you can still download at over 5-6Mbit/s even with a conference running without any degradation in image quality.
Our line is 10MB SDSL, if I remember correctly.

Technical knowledge: If you apply some common sense, you should be able to get by but the company we source the units from offer us techincal support/fault resolution as well as a warranty.

This is the company we use: http://www.saville.co.uk/ - They've been very good, in my experience so far.

Edit: Oh, and the unit we use at our main site is a Tandberg 880 MXP; at other sites, they are generally a lower-end model but still work adequately.
 
So your video conferencing equipment uses the same SDSL line as the rest of your traffic?

How much bandwidth does a multi-point call require though? Say you are connecting yourself and two other sites into a 3 way video conferencing call?
 
Wardie said:
So your video conferencing equipment uses the same SDSL line as the rest of your traffic?

How much bandwidth does a multi-point call require though? Say you are connecting yourself and two other sites into a 3 way video conferencing call?
Click to expand...

Yes, it's all run off the same line. I couldn't tell you exactly, but it leaves plenty of bandwidth free.
If I had to guess, I'd say it's around 1Mb/s; the video quality setting we choose is fairly low, though.
 
bigredshark said:
SDSL tops out at 2MB in the UK...
Click to expand...

Righto, it's 10MB down by something, at least.

Edit: It is 10Mb/10Mb, apparantly. I'm told it's basically a piece of fibre we had put in place to the ISP who're just down the road.
You are correct; it isn't , like I said earlier, SDSL.
 
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So most of you have moved away from ISDN?

Do you own all your own equipment? For example, the equipment required to bridge several video conferencing sites?

If you switch to an IP setup rather than using ISDN lines and you want to video conference with someone who is outside of your organisation and they use ISDN equipment, does this still work?

Point to point video conferencing seems straight forward and doable over IP, but it's the multi-point i'm not so sure about.

How about support all of this? Staff training and so on rather than having it supported by a 3rd party..
 
One thing that is on my list of things to look at if I get bored (it's actually titled that, though these days it'd be better labled 'things I'll surely never have time to look at') is enabling videoconferencing over multicast tunnels, will do wonders for multipoint conferencing quality and bandwidth use but only of use if you have a big private network at the moment. Eventually multicast will make it to the edge though...
 
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