By Sue Bradshaw, Technology Writer
Cisco TelePresence can provide an unparalleled user experience with true-to-life video and sound and means you can have meetings anywhere in the world without leaving your office. As businesses with international reach seek to reduce costs related to a dispersed workforce, TelePresence ensures that all participants have a full seat at the global meeting table.
TelePresence is inherently collaborative, leverages people skills and rapid communication extends the reach and productivity of those who use it. If you’ve invested time, energy and expense to build reliance on TelePresence, you’ll want your users to get into the rhythm of using the technology. Superb image quality is critical as successful interaction depends greatly on eye-to-eye contact. Voices must be free from distortion and heard with real time lip-synchronization.
It is a good idea to plan for heavy usage, particularly if you are seeking to reduce travel costs and your carbon footprint. To reach important decisions quickly many people would prefer to stay up during the night for an inter-continental TelePresence meeting rather than travel on a long-haul flight. As well as helping people feel more connected to the distant environment there are also the benefits of reduced travel budgets, reduced lost time, jetlag and impact on family life. TelePresence may also help cross language barriers by making it easier to communicate with physical cues like hand gestures.
To achieve these benefits, quality interaction must be ensured. There should be life-size images of people with real-time body language, who appear to share the meeting space as if at a table and most importantly, there is a means to accurately present the ultimate nonverbal cue – eye contact. If video quality is poor or audio is distracting, participants will focus on the impairments, become distracted and their attention may waver.
Investing regularly and incrementally in the network helps ensure it is video/media-ready. Managing TelePresence peripherals correctly will tell you which devices are in use, which peripherals are active and how they are performing, including uplink, IP phones, main cameras and displays, audio expansion units, microphones and the HDMI status.
It will also allow you to measure the load calls are placing on the network and if packets are being transmitted and received correctly. This includes details of how much data is being pushed across the connection, and the number of packets comprised in the total kilobyte count. At the packet level you can see if packets are delayed, lost, duplicated or experiencing jitter and how are they broken up as a percentage of the call and as an overall percentage for the period.
To find out more about monitoring Cisco TelePresence to provide effective communication and interaction irrespective of time, distance and location visit www.ir.com/telepresence
