Need new HD conferencing solution

[Frommy]

Just a heads-up, I posted this earlier today at wainhouse.com also.


Hi everyone,

My company is upgrading our videoconferencing equipment which consists of 1 Polycom VSX 7000 (Headquarters) and 7 VSX 3000 (Regional offices). A major necessity of the new system is having High Definition. The only use of the equipment is for communication between all the offices and Headquarters, no other outside sites. I had a few questions that I would like answered:

1)All the regional offices are running T1 and the HQ is running a 10 Mbps connection. Is this bandwidth good enough for the demands of HD conferencing?

2)If I'm not doing any conferencing with outside sources, wouldn't LifeSize be the best option? Polycom and Tandberg seem to offer more in terms of integrating different connection types and supporting different vendors. If I have mostly all T1 and use all LifeSize systems, the LifeSize Express (with a LifeSize Room system for the HQ) seems like a no-brainer.

3)From doing research and comparing reviews, user opinion, and pricing I don't see the advantages of the more expensive Polycom and Tandberg systems. Can someone please explain the added benefits of paying close to twice as much for these systems?

Also, we plan on buying a MCU (possibly Codian 4500 or LifeSize Multipoint) so the MCU abilities of some units is pretty pointless.

Thanks in advance for responses. I'm just getting my feet wet in videoconferencing so if anything above seems completely wrong, please be kind.

:classic:

[JFCOMEngineer]

The big thing to me is that regardless how you start out, systems tend to grow, and communications systems grow exponentially. It seems like at least once a week I get a call from someone that originally bought a system that would never be used for anything except a weekly meeting with the {fill in the blank}, but now they need to use it to have meetings with supplier X, Y and Z. As fuel prices increase I expect to see this become more and more common.

Because of this I tend to recommend scalable solutions. I have never tried to scale up a LifeSize installation other than to use the endpoints. That said, I haven't had problems with LifeSize, what I have seen has been decent gear, particularly at the price point. The thing to be careful of is to ensure that you are comparing apples to apples. Anyone who has worked in sales knows how to use the most favorable numbers to make their presentation, so be sure that the prices you are looking at re for the same capability sets. I recently had a vendor try to sway a client in exactly this manner, but when I made them provide the specs for the compared solutions it was obvious to everyone what had been tried.

The Codian is a good unit, but if you are only going to have 7 systems then it seems a bit like overkill. If you anticipate growing the network, I personally would recommend a Tandberg solution, it's scalable, has decent security, and great support.

Just my $.02

Regards,

Wes

[dfreeman]

We don't sell equipment, you can take that for what it is. I would recommend the Lifesize without any hesitation. Not only do they work well at HD but even at lower BW they have a great picture. We install between 5 and 15 systems every day, and we see a lot of different environments.

[Bullcrappy]

For low end, non intagrated rooms Life Size is ok. the camera kinda stinks compared tpo the HDX, hell even the tandberg cam is better.

also they tend to run very hot fyi...

B

[videojunkie1208]

I am a big fan of Tandberg equipment as well, and the Experia is a pretty impressive set up...

That being said, you can get some pretty impressive results on a 2mb call from an MXP codec, at that point it really depends on the cameras and room setup. If you are serious about going HD, you will want to re-evaluate the lighting in addition to the cameras and other gear that is feeding the codec (and the displays..) On the surface it seems like you should have enough bandwidth for HD implementation.

Final note: some of the directors are just as happy that in real life we run most calls at 768K, as they know that the slightly lower quality video they are getting means that they don't feel like they need to have a makeup artist to make them look good for the camera.

$.02

Kevin