Travel industry should be afraid, very afraid, of telepresence

Stuart Corner
Monday, 21 January 2008 10:28

Opinion and Analysis

It is still very early days for telepresence; the technology is expensive; it requires very significant bandwidth and very high grade networks with low latency so installation in-house is going to be the luxury of very few large corporations for some time to come. However public facilities are available in major centres - global serviced office group Regus is installing 50 Cisco telepresence suites around the world.

But there is no doubt that the cost of the technology and the bandwidth it needs will come down and the amount of bandwidth available to medium sized enterprises will go up. And there will be a whole spectrum of technologies from high quality desktop PC videoconferencing (Skype and Logitech are offering this in high definition ) to full telepresence and beyond (check out this YouTube video of Chambers talking to Cisco SVP Marthin DeBeer who is present, not in the flesh but as a 3D holographic image transmitted from a different continent.

Notwithstanding the economies of scale achieved by the new super-large passenger aircraft the rising price of oil will push the price of travel up and the ever more draconian security measures will make the experience more unpleasant and more frustrating. The only real uncertainty is how fast it will all happen.