Telepresence: Finally, videoconferencing that works

July 31, 2007 from Computerworld – “Telepresence is expensive, requires two or more dedicated conference rooms outfitted with specialized equipment (or in some cases, custom-built to house the equipment) and often runs on proprietary network technology. But it's such a vast improvement over any previous video-based collaboration system that enterprise users are quickly signing up.”

180 View – We are waiting for the day that high quality videoconferencing is cheap and easy, which we think will come as telecommunication speeds continue to improve. To put speeds in perspective, the modems we once used to connect to the internet gave us a maximum of 56 Kbps (kilobytes per second) but it was usually less. Now we typically use Cable or DSL providing speeds of 1500-2000 Kbps. You can expect speeds to increase rapidly especially if we get optical fiber connections at our office. Optical Fiber can now deliver speeds of 10,000,000 Kbps (enough to download a movie in 4 seconds). At the 2007 Optical Fiber Conference, IBM scientists revealed a prototype optical transceiver chipset capable of reaching speeds at least eight times faster than optical components available today. Exciting times ahead…