Telepresence: The Next GenerationTelepresence: The Next Generation

Cisco today announced its next iteration of telepresence, moving both up and down in scale from its initial table-based system. As you can see in the photos with the release, the new designs are "personal", i.e., one-to-one; and double-rows for bigger groups.

Cisco today announced its next iteration of telepresence, moving both up and down in scale from its initial table-based system. As you can see in the photos with the release, the new designs are "personal", i.e., one-to-one; and double-rows for bigger groups.It's easier to get the rationale for going bigger; the one-on-one system, at almost $34K per station list, seems like a big spread over the what it would cost to equip a PC with a basic Webcam, bandwidth upgrade, and solid gold hat for the participant. Still, a lot of important international meetings are one-on-one, and this way you don't have to tie up the telepresence room for a high-value small meeting.

Of course, you'll need to dedicate about 5 Mpbs of network bandwidth to that single-screen telepresence session, which isn't necessarily going to be a problem on the LAN (especially if you upgrade to Gigabit at the desktop; maybe you want to use a Catalyst switch for that). But the bandwidth will have to be guaranteed across the WAN (and if you equip a few desktops per location with telepresence, you may need more router capacity; Cisco will be happy to sell you that as well).

John Bartlett says telepresence isn't that expensive, weighed against the benefits and tradeoffs. So the latest products may fill a need.