VoiceCon: Is Desktop Video In Your Future? Vendors Say Yes: Page 2 of 2

In most cases, the only thing moving is a person's head or face, so the changes are relatively small, needing only 1.5 Mbps on average to update the far end. More movement requires larger updates and more bandwidth. On a LAN, 1.5 Mbps on average isn't too bad, unless you have a lot of HD conferences going on, but over a WAN, HD conferences can gobble up bandwidth fairly quickly. Most HD conferencing systems are using H.264 Baseline or Main profiles, which define the frames per second and video resolution, the combination of which partially determines the required bandwidth needed for each stream.  

Polycom recently announced support for H.264 High Profile, which more aggressively compresses the video stream, and Polycom claims they can transmit 720P video at 512 Kbps or half of other 720P HD video products. Polycom also plans to support scalable video coding, pushing bandwidth requirements lower while making video delivery in a changing network more robust.

Both Tandberg and Polycom partner with major UC vendors like Avaya, Cisco and Microsoft, as well as integrators like HP, to provide a seamless video component to a larger communications product offering. Through integration with Active Directory and Exchange, video devices can be discovered like any other network resource and can tightly integrate with the UC scheduling and management system. While the prices for high end video-conferencing are still high, they will drop as adoption increases.