Voip and IP Video Conferencing

Hi

Does anyone have a pointer to a forum for ip video conferencing. We are
looking to have some of our meetings that would normally take place by
several members of staff travelling to another office 150 miles away,
stay over, etc and move these regular meetings to a vide based
conference over our existing wan.

Both locations already have dedicated meeting rooms with over head
projectors that are hooked up to laptops, connected to the network.

There is currently a 2mb leased line in place - it is on an mpls network
so can have qos applied and cisco switches are in place that will also
provide qos. What sort of quality can be expected and can a 2mb link,
which is likely to have max of 1.5mb assigned to it whilst a conference
is in place, either that or it will need increasing as there is still a
need for standard internet, email, wan traffic.

Im only just starting to look into it so is it basically voip + a video
package or something that handles both? Im about to start lots of
reading on this so any pointers welcome.

 

I always wonder why people find the idea of looking at co-workers so
attractive, just do it with a voice conference call

But anyway, most video-conferencing kit I've seen works over 128k ISDN
so bandwdth should not be your issue.

If you want to look at a room full of people pay attention to the
camera and to the sound pickup devices. Some use steerable cameras in
the style of an online live porn show.

http://www.polycom-uk.co.uk/pg.asp?ukvideoconferencing
http://www.midlandcomms.co.uk/products-video-conferencing.php

Phil

 

You need more bandwidth on IP because of the IP overhead. 256K IP is
only marginally better than 128K video.

Tim