Telepresence and Videoconferencing Infrastructure

Telepresence systems and previous generation video conferencing systems can offer huge feature lists giving the user all sorts of benefits, from the way they communicate, to the way they teach and learn; making the most of dispersed and diverse expertise, and touching a dispersed community. However with a potentially large community of users putting the services on the network makes that feature list available to all.  This means apart from anything else costs can be evenly distributed and the pressure on choosing the right end point is less of an issue.

This network based equipment provides powerful enhanced services for your telepresence system and is made up of four key components. The first of these is Call Control (historically the Gatekeeper) this will manage the solution, give the end points their identity and route calls. Media or Gateway Services, act like a “Telephone Exchange” allowing calls both inbound and outbound of the local IP network to any video conferencing system or telephone connected to the WAN, public telephone network (nationally or internationally) or WWW.  Other services include Multipoint Services (MCU) to allow several sites to be connected in a single conference and solution Management.

Call Control

The Gatekeeper acts as the “Telephone Exchange” and does in effect map a dial plan on to the existing IP infrastructure.  It lets us call end points using a “phone number” or “name”, it also lets us manage and allow people certain services.

In addition to routing traffic to the Gateway and MCU services it also provides services of its own such as, call forwarding, forward on busy, forward on no answer etc. with the potential of handling thousands of endpoints and managing hundreds of consecutive calls.

Conference Services

An integrated MCU (Multipoint Conference Unit) can be installed to allow either ad-hoc or scheduled conferences to take place between multiple sites. These units are scalable from supporting 10 endpoint users in one or more conferences up to systems that support 100s.
The MCU is core to enabling true multimedia, multiparty collaboration in applications such as group conferencing, distance learning and training. The MCU can support multipoint voice, video and data collaboration and communications over any network, using any protocol, and to any end point.

Media or Gateway Services

Gateway services enable any-to-any interoperability between all standards-compliant SIP, H.323 and H.320 devices. These solutions make communities possible with a seamless, scalable solution that extends the benefits of video conferencing and telepresence to other communications environments including unified communications and IP Telephony networks.

Enabling open standards for any-to-any interoperability with standard- and high-definition video conferencing. Network-delivered media services include recording, streaming, and transcoding.

Management

Essential to any network based video communication solution is comprehensive management and reporting capabilities, including tools to measure use and gauge return on investment (ROI). These solutions deliver usability features like monitoring, scheduling and global directories to help ensure high use and low cost of ownership