When Telepresence Sounds BadWhen Telepresence Sounds Bad

What's the most important element in a telepresence system? Would you believe the audio?

What's the most important element in a telepresence system? Would you believe the audio?That's what Joe Frost of Psytechnics told me yesterday. I was talking with Joe about Psytechnics' new developments around telepresence quality monitoring/management--more about that in a second. "Users actually do tolerate video blocking and breaking up," Joe said. "It's the audio [degradation] they can't tolerate."

Back up a second. This is telepresence; you're not supposed to have degradation of any kind, are you? Actually, the scenario is one where telepresence is sort of a victim of its own success. That's also where the latest Psytechnics announcement comes in.

Psytechnics used this week's VON show to announce support for Cisco Telepresence in the Psytechnics Experience Manager product. In the early days of Telepresence, you didn't necessarily need a service management tool like Psytechnics', because the implementations were so expensive and high-profile that they tended to get provisioned with 15 Mbps of dedicated bandwidth to each of the sites where a Telepresence room was deployed, often run as a standalone managed service. No one was taking any chances about quality.

But what's been happening as telepresence deployments have spread, according to Joe Frost, is that enterprises are starting to deploy slimmed-down telepresence implementations in smaller remote sites--usually one HD screen instead of the 3 used in a full-blown Telepresence suite; and the system usually shares a WAN pipe with whatever else is going into the remote site, almost guaranteeing that the single screen won't get 5 Mpbs out, not to mention what happens when you try to deliver traffic from the heavy-duty telepresence suites into the smaller site.

Hence the need for a tool like Experience Manager, which can manage the traffic into the smaller site and give those users the best possible performance within the limitations they have.

So while telepresence may need to be pristine at the big, high-profile suites, you can still tie those suites to smaller sites and expand the collaborative experience. As long as the audio works.What's the most important element in a telepresence system? Would you believe the audio?