Hotel network cruels Cisco's grand vision

Beverley Head
Thursday, 06 May 2010 16:11

Business IT - Networking

Cisco and its latest sidekick Tandberg believe videoconferencing has now reached the tipping point to go mainstream, but as the company learned first hand today, fancy front-ends count for nothing if you don't have the right plumbing.

Tandberg chief technologist Hakon Dahle was slated to present a keynote at today's Visual Collaboration Summit  held in Sydney, speaking via videoconference from San Jose. However Tandberg could not get a stable connection, blaming the hotel's communications network, leaving a local staffer to fill the breach.

It was a clear demonstration that for organisations which are keen to use videoconferencing, it's important that there are stable, fat communications pipes available. That's one of the reasons for example why the NSW Government signed a $280 million deal with Telstra late last year to roll out broadband to the State's public schools, which will among other things, underpin the use of videoconferencing in the Connected Classrooms.

Nevertheless Cisco and Tandberg were at pains to explain that the use of video is on the march. According to Kevin Bloch, chief technology officer for Cisco ANZ, 65 per cent of the traffic on Cisco's network is now video, and that is growing 400 per cent every six months. Over the coming four years he predicted that the traffic on the internet would quadruple, with 91 per cent of that being video.

Bloch said that one of the factors driving this was the increasing demand for mobility, and the use of smarter mobile devices. Bloch claimed that there were now 4.6 billion mobile phones, and 0.4 billion smart phones. 'There is more traffic now from smartphones than all the other mobiles combined,' he said.

'Sixty six per cent of traffic out of mobile phones will be video in four years,' said Bloch. Clearly the bandwidth promised by the planned NBN will be needed, whatever today's McKinsey & Co report suggests, if Bloch's predictions are accurate.

Cisco paid $US3.4 billion for Tandberg, and completed the deal a fortnight ago, its 137th acquisition. Given that the company believes the collaboration market - of which videoconferencing represents a key element - is worth $US34 billion, its acquisition may prove well timed.