Enterprises without the manpower to develop and deliver training can take advantage of LMS (learning management system) vendors. Most LMS providers will store your courses, track student access and success, administer exams that measure student learning, and then produce a report. The Corporate University Xchange (www.corpu.com) is dedicated to best practices in this type of training and boasts a high-profile client list that includes IBM, Microsoft and Intel.
But what's the impact of this new application on the network? That depends on where training materials are stored and played out, whether the presentation technology used is TV or computer, the underlying video format, whether the content is cached or stored near the play-out point, and the path the video travels through the network. We cover all these in this Primer Pack.
One note: Consider intellectual property protection: With streaming servers that stream and play, content isn't cached, so no file is ever available on the player's computer to be appropriated. However, with download and play, the file must be protected. In their newest offerings, Adobe, Microsoft and Real Networks all provide capabilities to protect downloaded content; see "What the Big 3 Support in Streaming" chart.
Video Quality and the Network
It took IT several years to understand the relationship between VoIP output quality and network capacity. The sages told us that VoIP networks must be extremely high-performing, that even a 1 percent packet loss would be harmful to voice quality. But experience has shown that in VoIP, when a packet is not delivered, the receiving decoder simply plays the last packet over or synthesizes the sound. Our ears aren't sensitive enough to really miss that 1/50 second of audio. In fact, packet losses of 2 percent to 3 percent can be tolerated, absent other problems.
Video is different. In MPEG transport over UDP or RTP, losing one IP packet usually means that seven MPEG transport packets are lost. If they came from an I-frame, the impact is significant and may cause the decoder to incorrectly calculate the next dozen or so video frames (see "Compression: The Other GOP" for an explanation of frame types). This could represent nearly 1/3 of a second of output. On the other hand, if the IP frame carried information that belonged to a B-frame, the impact will be on that one frame only, causing a deterioration of 1/30 of a second of the video.
By combining resources and expertise, the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium will offer a blueprint for how industries can adapt to an AI-dominated future.
IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
There are many network courses that can address your present job's priorities and help you gain the needed skills to keep pace with industry changes and new technologies.
