Telepresence

As of today, teleconferencing between offices and colleagues is an easy way of communications within a business even through the individuals may be located several thousands of miles between each other. Telepresence technology has certainly changed within the last decade and a half but you can rack that up to a better understanding of the industry

and the electronics involved.

The average laymen probably saw telepresence in action when they purchased their first web cam. It allowed them to use one of a myriad of applications on the market today to hold a two-way conversation between themselves and another individual. While the video may be a little jumpy at times, near real time conversations can be held between the two or more persons involved.

Telepresence technology is to more of an extreme when it involves conferences held with medium to enterprise level corporations. While you won’t receive the same definition on the screen as you would with a high definition television set, the clarity is still quite clear. Voice communications of the meeting are quite crisp depending upon the audio system that is used with the conference.

There are several different systems available from companies around the world that can be used for teleconferencing. They vary in the number of cameras and microphones in use, the size of the video conference screen, the switching capabilities and the processing speed of the system. The cost of the system will greatly depend on the type of product that you select.

There have been several developments within the industry that has proven to be a boon to telepresence technology. These include improvements with VoIP (Voice-over-IP) and streaming video technologies. Many equipment manufactures have built their routers with improved QoS (Quality of Service) features. Quality of Service is the ability to provide different priority to different applications, users, or data flows, or to guarantee a certain level of performance to a data flow. When the routers at both locations of the teleconference offer this feature, they provide smoother flow of information between each user.

Many companies can use other technologies to improve the traffic rate as well. One of these is where both instances of the business use compression algorithms between each location. Although the data packet rates are still the same, more information is stuffed within each data packet. This results in an increased flow of video and audio information used within the teleconference meeting.

It is suggested that companies that are using telepresence technology utilize a minimum T1 (or DS1) line that is available for lease from several different telecommunications businesses in their area. This circuit transmits and receives 1.544 Mbit/s of information concurrently and is usually fast enough for teleconferencing.  There are options available which can provide even a greater speed depending on the amount of traffic that is emanating from the network.

Telepresence technology has seen a great improvement over the last several years in both the equipment that is offered as well as the transportation of data. The market for this type of product is gaining more acceptance on the corporate level and you can expect more businesses to use this technology.