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Survivor's Guide to 2005: Digital Convergence: Page 5 of 8

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Videoconferencing over IP can reduce travel time for executives and other employees and cut the costs of transmitting audio and video over expensive ISDN lines. In addition, new products, such as Polycom's VSX 3000 and VCon's Vigo, are moving videoconferencing from complex, expensive boardrooms setups to inexpensive, easy-to-use desktop systems.

ISDN still commands much of the videoconferencing market, but it's expensive--each circuit (call) has high per-minute fees associated with each channel. But before you kiss your ISDN lines goodbye, there are some things you must know about video and the network to keep bandwidth requirements low and maintain video quality for conferencing.

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First, let's talk about quality in videoconferencing. There's no need for the approximately 30 frame-per-second, full-motion support on your desktop that you have on television. You can get by with 10 to 15 fps as long as no one starts dancing on the conference table. With today's compression for audio and video, this translates to about 128 Kbps to 768 Kbps for an IP-based H.323 videoconference.