Telepresence

Enterprises are undertaking various IT initiatives (e.g., unified communication (UC), adding telepresence and streaming video) that are dramatically increasing the amount of  video traffic to their networks.  Travel restrictions also favor the usage of new communication technologies. As video traffic increases on the enterprise wide area network (WAN), IT organizations are faced with a new challenge of ensuring the quality of the video traffic while maintaining the performance of critical business applications and voice over IP (VoIP).

Interactive video (telepresence, videoconference) requires optimum quality, more than VoIP.  Even when bandwith is guaranteed, packet loss can result in video degradation. Network latency can result in the desynchronization of sound and picture. Furthermore, videoconference or telepresence requires a great deal of bandwidth, from a few hundreds of kbps up to 12 Mbit/s of bandwidth for high definition. Therefore, bandwidth management must be very dynamic to ensure efficient bandwidth allocation not only for the video multimedia flows and VoIP, but also for critical business applications.

Some believe that by just controlling bandwidth, video traffic can be fully optimized.  However, bandwidth controls alone are not enough.  Visibility into the network traffic flows is required, not only to understand the types of video traffic exchanged over the network, but also to evaluate the video performance for the end-users. Real-time monitoring and troubleshooting tools are therefore very helpful to solve any performance slowdown. Monitoring video performance consistently over time helps IT organizations to  implement the best prioritization policies and aids with capacity planning for the branch offices with the most loaded access links.

With Streamcore Branch Office solutions, enterprises can benefit from:

• Advanced Visibility:
  • Benefit from usage reporting for telepresence traffic
  • Follow videoconference quality with dedicated measurements (latency, jitter, packet loss...) and signaling performance measurements per site and even per communication
  • Use true real-time troubleshooting (last 10 seconds) to determine if the WAN is the root cause of the performance degradation
• Dynamic Performance Control: 
  • Activate advanced QoS mechanisms to reserve bandwidth for real-time video traffic and to automatically prioritize interactive signaling messages (e.g., SIP)
  • Ensure that business application performance are protected when competing with bandwidth-hungry video traffic

Streamcore solutions for Telepresence are vendor-agnostic and can be deployed along with any leading Telepresence vendor. However, we have established a priviledged relationship with Polycom and are referenced as an ARENA partner. To learn more