Cisco Demos Public Rooms For Telepresence

CWmike writes "Matt Hamblen reports that Cisco Systems Inc. has announced the first telepresence videoconferencing rooms available for public use. It demonstrated the technology simultaneously in four locations in India, the US and the UK Three of the four demonstration sites were retrofitted rooms in Taj Hotels in London, Bangalore, India and Boston. The luxury hotel chain will build the videoconferencing rooms for business and guest use at rates starting at $400 an hour in the Boston location. Cisco said prices will vary from $299 to $899 an hour at various locations globally, depending on the number of users. The rooms can accommodate from one to 18 people."

Comments

Re:How about Meeting In Person?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can fly 18 people to India for $899?
Cheapest tickets out there are $1200/person.
With telepresence you can get 2 rooms for $1800 and have a meeting with 36 people, or you can fly 18 of them out for $16,182 and have a bunch of cranky people that had to take 24 hour flights and deal with international travel hassles

LifeSize

[SLOviper]

The Cisco Telepresence systems are nice, but not /that/ nice. $400 per hour seems a bit steep when you have to travel to the meeting place to begin with. Maybe for the extremely rare instance for a smallish company.

For our VTC, we use relatively cheap LifeSize systems. We've had good luck with stability and interoperability although most of our VTC is LifeSize to LifeSize. Still, at $5K for a basic system (plus display) it wouldn't take long to make that up. A fully integrated room like the Cisco system goes for ~$75K.

One more note. If you're going to do serious VTC, use Masergy.

One one more note, LifeSize just released their new systems which do 1080p30. I don't know about bandwidth, but the "old" 720p30 systems that I'm using do that with ~1100kbps. I'm assuming that the new ones will require ~4 times that for full motion.

Obligatory disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with LifeSize, just a happy customer. :-)