Cisco's Virtual Teleportation Replaces Airports

Aficionados of Star Trek have long anticipated the day when we could simply beam instantly to wherever we want to go. Well, the technology just isn't there yet. There have been some interesting experiments in quantum physics that suggest physical teleportation may indeed be possible. But it's probably going to have to wait for another century. We we have now, thanks to Cisco, is virtual teleportation.

What can the virtual form of teleportation do for you? How about take you instantly to a business meeting in Hong Kong or Germany or New York? You walk into the conference room and find your colleagues seated around the meeting table. But only some of them are where you are. Others are somewhere else in the world. They look the same, they sound the same. But they are on the other side of a table that you can't reach across.

Cisco calls this technology TelePresence. It's a major improvement in the last big advance in collaboration, video conferencing. The low resolution, small screen size and muddy audio typical of many video conferencing systems has been replaced by large flat screen displays, high definition full motion video, high fidelity audio, and a virtual conference table.

The table is the final touch of magic that makes the TelePresence experience seem real. Each TelePresence room is outfitted with a half table pushed up against a wall. When you turn on the system, the other half of the table appears through the video displays on the wall making it look like there is a single large table. Your local team sits on the physical side. Other participants sit on the virtual side. Except to them they are sitting on the physical side and you are sitting on the virtual side.

Cisco has deployed about 1,000 of these TelePresence systems to about 200 enterprise customers worldwide. They also have a fleet of their own TelePresence meeting rooms in 129 cities of 40 countries. I say fleet, because what Cisco has really created here is a replacement for airlines and airports.

Consider a typical business meeting. You go to an airport, board a plane, land at another airport, and then go to a more or less standard business meeting room at your destination. They're pretty much all the same. You have a large wooden desk with arm chairs in a windowless room containing acoustic tiles and fluorescent lights. There's an overhead projector with screen, a computer to upload your PowerPoint presentations, and a roll-around cart with coffee dispensers. The conference rooms are standardized, as are the airports and planes. So why not just get rid of the airports and planes?

Since all you really need are the conference rooms, just go ahead and hook them together. A TelePresence system and a high bandwidth connection allow you to remove the wall between the conference rooms and simply join them. It's just like opening the partition between two physical rooms in one building. Except that those rooms can be anywhere on Earth that you can get the needed bandwidth. That's pretty much any metropolitan area these days.

Cisco is now renting out their own TelePresence rooms starting at $299 an hour. Expensive room rent? Not really. You'll have a hard time spending less than that to transport one participant via air. If you need to send several people with perhaps overnight stays, Cisco's offer starts to look downright cheap. If your company does a lot of meetings, the cost of a dedicated in-house TelePresence conference center may well be justified. So it may cost up to several hundred thousand dollars for a deluxe setup? So what? How much does that private jet cost to operate and maintain?

Cisco's promoting their TelePresence service as an alternative to the inconvenience of travel. But the benefits go beyond cost savings and the avoided travel stresses. With TelePresence you have the ability to arrange same day meetings with international participation. Teams may just move into one of these rooms to collaborate on their projects. Imagine the productivity improvement when everyone is at the same table continuously. Communications delays become a thing of the past.

Cisco's order of magnitude improvement to video conferencing has created a "realness" to virtual meetings that could become so comfortable that physical meetings may seem ridiculous. Yeah, but, you can't all go out to lunch or dinner, can you? Why not? With the same catering at each end, why can't you dine virtually? There may even be a way to play those silly team bonding games with props and facilitators at each end. Anyone want to hang climbing ropes from the ceilings?

All this virtual collaboration may seem a bit awkward now, but I've got a feeling that it could catch on and become the norm rather than the exception. It wasn't that long ago that exchanging documents was done by overnight mail rather than instantaneous email or even FAX. Who wants to wait for the Post Office anymore? Could the day be far away that people will say, "who wants to wait for a plane anymore?"

Telepresence as a Service

Just as telephone means sending your voice at a distance and television means pictures at a distance, telepresence means projecting yourself at a distance. It's not quite the Star Trek technology of beaming yourself physically from one place to another, but it might be close enough for business purposes. Now that Cisco and AT&T are teaming up to offer telepresence as a managed service rather than a capital expense, could the floodgates be opening for the virtual business call?

Telepresence has its roots in video conferencing. I remember using video conferencing in a large enterprise a decade ago. It wasn't pretty. The system was telephone based with a conference phone on long table and a video projector showing the feed from the far end on a pull-down screen. Images were fuzzy. To get everyone in the picture you had to widen the camera angle so far that it was hard to see facial expressions. Movement? Ha! I think we saw better full motion video from the Moon landings.

The real problem with telephone based video teleconferencing is that there's really not enough bandwidth to get the job done right. Even with 128 Kbps available through ISDN BRI phone service, video looks a long way from realistic. But now that broadband connectivity is ubiquitous, the door is open to high quality voice, video and data sharing. Cisco has been the big player in capitalizing on this new capability and at just the time it is needed most.

The best friend telepresence has is $100+ per barrel oil. High fuel prices are already stifling consumer travel. How much longer before they kill business travel? Not completely, of course. There are some situations where you positively have to meet in person to close the deal. But can you really afford to keep sending teams of a dozen participants to present a business case or attend a professional seminar? How about when you'd like to get together and hammer out some engineering details or contract clauses, but you're in New York and they're in Los Angeles and you'd really like to have things wrapped up by 5 PM? When it's now 2 PM?

What telepresence does is bridge the gap between physical locations for most needs. Cisco's approach has been to emulate the conference room table by dividing it half. Your half, on either end, is still a physical wood table. Their half, also on either end, is one or more high definition video screens with wide band audio. The scene is designed to fool the eye and ear into believing that your colleagues 3,000 miles away are right there on the other side of that conference table. As long as you don't try to pass a pot of coffee or plate of cookies over there, you might just be able to maintain that illusion indefinitely.

The beauty of a telepresence system is that goes beyond just shaving the cost of business travel. The additional leverage of being able to meet virtually at any time with participants from almost anywhere can more than offset the disappointment of not being able to get out of the office and go visiting, depending on how you feel about business travel. Another bonus you gain is all that downtime riding on buses and getting your shoes screened at the airport is recovered. If time is money, the value of additional productive hours may even exceed the bottom line on the expense report.

Up until now, there have been two giant hurdles to improved teleconferencing. One has been the inherent bandwidth limitations of trying to feed anything but phone calls down a phone line. That's been solved by broadband connections, either dedicated Internet VPN service or point to point private networking. Cisco estimates you need 1 to 5 Mbps to support their TelePresence system. Most larger companies have that now with T1 lines (1.5 Mbps) and DS3 connections (45 Mbps). Carrier Ethernet at 10, 100 and 1,000 Mbps makes the high definition conferencing option even more compelling.

The other hurdle has been cost. With specially designed and outfitted conference rooms needed to get the real value from Cisco's TelePresence, the capital expense has been appropriate only for the largest of corporations. Perhaps that barrier is also going to fall. Cisco's partner AT&T has the worldwide IP networking capability to provide the bandwidth. Cisco can provide the dedicated hardware. Companies can pay as they go using this managed service without having to risk huge amounts of construction capital when they're not so sure how much they'll really use it.

On a smaller scale, desktop and small meeting teleconferencing is proving popular for virtual workgroups, online enterprises, and sales training. Many of these are Web conferences with audio teleconferences supporting the slide shows and computer presentations. The cost is low enough that even the smallest companies can afford a service such as GoToMeeting or GoToWebinar.

Do you need help upgrading your audio and video conferencing equipment? How about improving your network WAN bandwidth to support communications with your employees, customers and suppliers? Being agile with your electronic conferencing capabilities offers the potential for faster response time, travel cost savings, and a greener approach to running your business.