Huawei upgrades its telepresence offering

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 15 November 2011 18:15

Business IT - Networking

Huawei is ramping up its assault on the Australian telepresence market with the launch of new multi screen room systems that, it claims, can achieve total costs of ownership that are up to 50 percent those of its competitors.

According to Huawei Australia's enterprise managing director, Gavin Milton-White, the cost savings are in part the result of lower equipment prices and in part the system's ability to deliver HD video in half the bandwidth of competing systems. "We can do a high quality video call at up to half the bandwidth of our competitors and we have what we call super error correction that enables us to operate in an environment with up to five percent packet loss with no impact on video quality," he claimed.

Huawei is also promoting the fact that the new products are "built entirely on open standards" and fully interoperable with other vendors' systems as key advantages. However the proprietary compression and error correcting technologies are not available across multi-vendor installations.

At the Gartner symposium/ITxpo, on the Gold Coast yesterday Huawei launched three models incorporating its 'Telepresence 2.0' technology: one model for between 3-6 users (TP3106), and two room-immersive systems for either 6-14 users (TP3118S) or 6-18 users (TP3118).

Huawei last month became the first company to demonstrate full interoperability between its own and competing telepresence equipment in Australia when it connected its system at AARNet to those from Polycom and Cisco.

In addition to its high-end room systems Huawei also sells in Australia a desktop product, the TP1950 and, according to Milton-White, it has done well with this product selling to health professionals taking advantage of the Medicare rebate scheme.

"The TP1950 is an all in one unit with camera and codec built in that we offer for eHealth and eEducation," he said. "We have done technical and sales training that enables our channel to go and talk to GPs etc. We are seeing strong uptake for this solution."

He added: "It operates with a dongle, I can operate this with a 4G Huawei dongle in the back of it." Huawei supplies WiMAX dongles to vividwireless but the only LTE dongles in Australia are those from Sierra Wireless sold by Telstra. Optus is planning to launch LTE services at some unspecified time. Milton-White would not be drawn on just what he meant by a Huawei 4G dongle, but said that it was "coming soon."

He declined to say how many TP1950s had bee sold and, as regards the larger systems, said: "We have customers who are deploying as we speak so I cannot mention their names."