Personal Tele-Presence 1700 MXP

Tele-Presence as we all know, can save travel cost by providing an effective way of communication. Here is a Tele-Presence solution from Tandberg for desktop usage

Friday, May 01, 2009

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With a price tag of 6L+, this product is meant for individuals or group of individuals who spend too much on travel. 1700 MXP comes with inbuilt 20 inch LCD screen with high definition camera mounted on top. Every action of this unit is controlled with a remote control, making it more flexible.

To make a call, just pick up your remote, enter URI or IP address of the other end and press Call. You can connect up to four locations at a time. The remote has built in sensors and comes out of sleep mode instantly as you pick it up. It supports most major standards for communication like H.323, H.281, RFC 3550, SIP, etc. Security is provided via DES and AES encryption. Downspeeding and Intelligent packet loss recovery techniques are used as protection against network interruption while making video calls. Using downspeeding, you can remain connected even if 97% of bandwidth is lost.

Setting up this solution requires a public IP and power supply. Simply give a public IP and you're ready to use this unit. To share presentations, you can connect this unit with a computer via VGA connector. There is a dedicated button on the remote making it possible to share presentations with a single press.

True HD experience is only possible if both ends are connected with similar Tele-Presence solutions. Therefore, one has to pay around double the amount for two-way HD communication and more for multi-point conferencing.

Another important point is interoperability of solutions from different vendors. We were able to connect to Polycom's Tele-Presence solution without any difficulty , which shows the versatility of this product. To test bandwidth requirements, we created an isolated network with 1700 MXP at one end and Microsoft NetMeeting on other. To emulate Internet, we used Network Knightmare WAN emulator. Using this device, we were able to set latency and bandwidth in the isolated network.

We started with 128 Kbps and found connection was almost impossible with a lot of disturbance. When we moved up to 512 Kbps, video and audio quality became good with very low latency. We further increased bandwidth to 1024 Kbps and found video and audio quality to be excellent. One irritating issue was the slight lag in audio, which faded away when we increased bandwidth to above 2kbps.

Bottomline: If you are ready to invest substantial amount upfront and generate RoI through travel cuts then this solution is right for you.

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