SCIENCE
Internet2 Commons Announces New Service To Enable Interoperable Telepresence Bridging
Today, Internet2 announced a substantial improvement to its real time collaboration offerings through a recent investment in Cisco TelePresence Server infrastructure. Leveraging the Telepresence Interoperability Protocol (TIP) 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.
Internet2 director of technology Mike LaHaye said, “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. 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.
David Devereaux-Weber, network consultant at The University of Wisconsin – Madison said: “Cisco TelePresence brings a number of significant improvements to the world of video collaboration. Concurrently, the Research and Education community has invested a lot of time and money developing infrastructure for video conferencing. This effort by Internet2 will offer a bridge between the world of H.323 and TelePresence and video conferencing. These new capabilities protect existing video conference investments and offer interoperability between them and the new TelePresence facilities."
At the Winter 2011 ESCC/Internet2 Joint Techs Meeting from January 30 - February 3, 2011, Internet2 director of technology, Mike LaHaye, presented a joint session with Indiana University network engineer, Brent Sweeny, where they provided more details about the R&E Cisco TelePresence Exchange. Additional details about the service will be forthcoming in the next few months. For information on these new services contact: telepresence@internet2.edu
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.
Internet2 director of technology Mike LaHaye said, “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. 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.
David Devereaux-Weber, network consultant at The University of Wisconsin – Madison said: “Cisco TelePresence brings a number of significant improvements to the world of video collaboration. Concurrently, the Research and Education community has invested a lot of time and money developing infrastructure for video conferencing. This effort by Internet2 will offer a bridge between the world of H.323 and TelePresence and video conferencing. These new capabilities protect existing video conference investments and offer interoperability between them and the new TelePresence facilities."
At the Winter 2011 ESCC/Internet2 Joint Techs Meeting from January 30 - February 3, 2011, Internet2 director of technology, Mike LaHaye, presented a joint session with Indiana University network engineer, Brent Sweeny, where they provided more details about the R&E Cisco TelePresence Exchange. Additional details about the service will be forthcoming in the next few months. For information on these new services contact: telepresence@internet2.edu