ANN ARBOR – Internet2 announced a substantial improvement to its real time video collaboration offerings through a recent investment in Cisco TelePresence Server infrastructure.
Leveraging the Telepresence Interoperability Protocol standard, the new equipment will enable Cisco TelePresence to interoperate with standards based SIP and H.323 videoconferencing.
Additionally, the Cisco TelePresence Video Communication Servers will provide multiprotocol dialing and reachability.
The new hardware will provide a valuable refresh and expansion for Internet2?s real time collaboration infrastructure as it significantly expands the existing bridging, dialing, and reachability capabilities that enable participants to schedule and hold distributed meetings, conferences, classes, and working groups, in support of research and education. Internet2 provides real time collaborations services like these through its Commons service.
The new equipment will be utilized along with the existing Internet2 Commons infrastructure not only to revamp and expand current service offerings, but also to bring the existing community of standards based SIP and H.323 videoconferencing endpoints together with Cisco TelePresence endpoints. The latter will be accomplished in conjunction with the unified Research and Education (R&E) Cisco TelePresence Exchange, jointly operated by Internet2 and National LambdaRail (NLR) to facilitate reachability for Cisco TelePresence in the R&E community.
?This new capability allows Internet2 to continue our leadership role of video and real-time collaboration offerings in the R&E community by linking members and their partners together independent of their videoconferencing environment,? said Internet2 director of technology Mike LaHaye. ?The new capabilities clearly bring more value to members who currently utilize different forms of telepresence, while providing a scalable, cost-effective gateway for members who have not yet deployed telepresence in their organizations.?
?With the growth of video communications across all segments of education, it is great to see the Internet2 – NLR unified Research and Education Cisco TelePresence Exchange continuing to deploy new services to meet the increasing video needs of the R& E community?, said Dave West, senior director, public sector, architectures and engineering, Cisco.
At the Internet2 2010 Fall Member Meeting, a demonstration of these capabilities was presented to showcase the multi-vendor, multi-screen interoperability features supported by the Cisco TelePresence Server. The demonstration showcased a mix of single and multi-screen rooms, low-latency stream switching, and stream adaptation for optimized results and firewall traversal. This demonstration also connected to the existing unified Research and Education Cisco TelePresence Exchange to highlight additional interoperability options.
Additional details about the service will be forthcoming in the next few months. For more information, click on [email protected]
a>>
