Rob bristow tenet v-c workshop - keynote

Rob Bristow, NREN Exchange Fellow, TENET

4th Nov 2014 Video-conferencing for higher education and research

Introductions

»  Who am I? ›  On secondment from Jisc in the UK for two years –  Part of Jisc Futures division –  Worked at Jisc on video-‐conferencing projects

›  What is Jisc? –  UK NREN parent company –  Janet is the TENET equivalent – runs national video-‐

conferencing service –  Jisc runs services and development programmes in all

areas of technology and tertiary education

›  What do I/Jisc know about video-‐conferencing and education? –  Quite a lot!

Why are we here?

»  It is clear that there is an unmet need aroundvideo-‐conferencing

»  TENET ran PoC with hosted VMRs ›  Take up was patchy (for a number of reasons) ›  In the end, being able to connect H.323 rooms to each other was not

that useful ›  Expensive and not that flexible

» What else can we do?

»  Is Adobe Connect the answer?

»  Should there be a central “bridge”? 4th Nov 2014 TENET 3

Responses to questionnaires

» Really good response rate -‐ So Thank you! » Responses show desire for: ›  Interoperability ›  Understanding of the mixed nature of what is in place ›  Desire for some sort of central bridging facility » Demand for more bandwidth » H.323/SIP, Lync and Skype predominate as deployed technologies » Streaming and wider delivery seen as important by some 4th Nov 2014 TENET 4

Teliris Express Telepresence conference

What is Video enabled collaboration?

»  Anything that involves collaboration and video (but may also include other things)

»  From Telepresence to the desktop

»  Room-‐based conferencing

»  Desktop conferencing »  Web conferencing

»  These things are now converging – mobile is here

»  The goal is a system that spans from web-‐conferencing to Tele-‐Presence

»  How to join things up?

»  Interoperability! Desktop Conferencing using Vidyo

Key benefits (From Jisc study)

»  Reduced stress & time of travel (75%)

»  Better control of time (61%)

»  Easier to stay in touch (49%)

»  Better work-‐life balance

»  Compensate for travel difficulties

»  Easier to arrange meetings

»  Involve more people

»  Improved communication with external partners

»  Tangible travel and subsistence savings

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What’s wrong with conferencing?

»  The room is booked out or locked

»  The support people have gone home

»  The equipment is out of commission

»  There is echo on the audio feed

»  The system I have is not compatible with the one the other people are using

»  The network is up and down and the video quality makes this system unusable

»  I can conference from a room but why can’t I join from my laptop or cell phone or iPad at my desk, or at home or from anywhere in the world?

»  I want to easily share content from whichever device I am using

»  Etc…

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Jisc Project conclusions

»  There are considerable benefits accruing from, and opportunities for more, virtual meetings

»  Virtual meetings don’t always replace travel ›  new uses – enabling that which simply used not be possible ›  stimulating and sustaining contact

»  Considerable CO2 benefits for all ›  largest element in research intensive universities is (long haul) air

»  Air travel generally dominates CO2 equivalent travel

»  But overall business benefits are mainly related to short-‐medium distance travel air travel

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Video-‐conferencing

» Parts to this presentation: ›  The changing landscape of video-‐conferencing › Meeting the needs of South African Higher Education ›  The intentions for this workshop

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State of play of conferencing

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Immersive Telepresence

» Very expensive » Senior executives’ toy (the private jet) » Has been described as ‘telepresence is the equivalent of a company having a single “e-‐mail room”’ » In the end -‐ so what!

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“Legacy” conferencing

»  Otherwise known as H.323 or SIP or standards based

»  The old way – expensive room based systems and heavy duty back end processing

»  Betrays its telecommunications roots

»  Only now waking up to the growth of demand for mobile and desktop conferencing

»  Easy to use (relatively) »  Limited functionality beyond video and audio (e.g.

content sharing)

»  Vendors include Polycom, Lifesize, Ayaya, Cisco, etc.

»  Generally business – not education focused

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Polycom TPX 204M

Web conferencing

»  The other end of the spectrum

»  Content is king – so presentation is centre stage »  Video and audio not usually as well done. Lack of

echo-‐cancellation can cause really bad problems

»  Good for push – webinar or for where interaction is not so important

»  Examples include Adobe Connect, Cisco Webex, Blackboard Collaborate and Big Blue Button/MConf (open source)

»  Doesn’t really move off the desktop to enable bigger groups to interact

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Consumer and desktop clients

»  Skype ›  Great for one to ones and presence

›  Network parasite

›  Can’t interoperate with anything else

»  FaceTime

›  Apple only

»  Lync ›  Part of the MS Office stack – so on a lot of desktops

›  Replacing traditional telephony – soft phones

›  Can interoperate with many other systems

›  One to watch

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Transcoderless and scalable Video-‐conferencing

»  These use variants of the SVC extension to theH.264 video compression standard (Annex G)

»  Sends a base layer which is enough – and then enhancement layers as the circumstances dictate

»  Traffic goes through a media router – but the decoding/encoding is done intelligently on the end points

»  Endpoints get the resolution and detail they can handle

»  Advantages:

›  Efficient low cost infrastructure – backend is much cheaper than traditional MCUs

›  Excellent network resilience -‐ copes well with variable bandwidth situations

›  Real time adaption – constant tailoring of what gets sent to each end point

›  Flexibility

»  Gateways to H.323/SIP world

»  Lync and Outlook integration 09/10/14 TENET 18

Access Grid Session in Progress

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Uses of video-‐conferencing -‐ Music

»  LOLA – Low Latency Project

»  Enable real time musical performances where musicians are physically located in remote sites – useful for:

›  Rehearsals before a concert

›  Masterclasses

›  Performance with distributed performers

»  Heavy network requirements:

›  Needs from 94Mbps to 500Mbps end-‐to-‐end

›  Network jitter must be very stable (<3ms at 30fps, <6ms at 60fps)

›  Hops must be minimised, and firewalls opened

»  From Conservatorio di Musica Giuseppe Tartini from Trieste (Italy)

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Cloud services & Integrators

» But we may still have islands on video-‐conferencing

» Enter the integrators and cloud services » But most of these mean traffic going to Europe or the US – so not really an option at present in South Africa

» Promise of any system connecting to any system – but this really means going via H.323/SIP for now


Some emerging themes

»  Software endpoints and infrastructure ›  Much cheaper ›  More flexible ›  User provisioned and launched

»  Cloud based offerings – pay for what you use

»  Desktop and mobile – anyone connecting from anywhere

»  Unified communications – presence, IM, telephony and video

»  The right tool for the job »  Video in browser – WebRCT


UK Developments

»  Janet (UK NREN) recently launched new service called V-‐Scene

»  Old offering was a farm of MCUs and a rather clunky booking service, along with a dreadful desktop client

»  Some advice and guidance on purchasing and use

»  Quality assurance of endpoints

»  But use was patchy and seemed mostly directed at schools

»  Some heavy use in colleges with multiple sites

»  New Platform incorporating Vidyo for desktop/personal and Cisco MCUs for H.323/SIP

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VIDYO

»  Scalable, modular, flexible, configurable

»  Mostly virtualised

»  Good traction in research communities (CERN, SKA)

»  Desktop and web client

›  All participants can share content

»  All registered user get a virtual meeting room

»  Room systems

»  Gateway to H.323/SIP

»  Pay as you use pricing model

»  API and SDK allows for custom intgration options

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Vidyo at CERN

»  CERN needed to scale V-‐C capabilities

»  Traditional V-‐C was way too expensive

»  Settled on Vidyo »  20,000 user accounts »  Routers in many locations (one coming on line

in Cape Town)

»  Over 800 concurrent connections at peak

»  Cool graphic here: http://avc-‐dashboard.web.cern.ch/Vidyo

»  CERN asked TENET to provide hosting for Vidyo Router for SA use

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So what to use?

»  What do you want to do ›  Teaching and learning ›  Research collaboration and coordination ›  Outreach

›  Administration

»  What does you have in your university? ›  Rooms ›  Desktop

»  What can you get access to via the cloud? ›  Some of the new approaches can be run in a browser – Web RCT

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Who will use it?

» Admin ›  Split sites ›  Cross institutional organisations » Research collaboration ›  Project management » Teaching and learning ›  Video-‐conferencing everywhere ›  Record sessions or stream to wider internet ›  Role here for Web-‐conferencing?

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And finally – some words of advice

»  Local Network Configuration needs to be stable, and in particular firewalls need to be correctly configured.

»  Room systems need to be properly configured including network and routing settings.

»  Meeting rooms need to have good acoustics and good light

»  Provide good quality audio play back in rooms

»  Laptop / PC / mobile users need to have reasonable spec hardware & preferably headset and microphone (although Vidyo has built in echo cancellation)

»  Laptop / PC / mobile users can connect using only a web browser, but get more functionality if they install the Vidyo client before connecting.

»  Test the setup before a meeting starts, not when the meeting is supposed to start

»  However good the hardware is, bandwidth across the internet will always be a limiting factor, however latency is even more critical.

»  User familarisation and expectations are key – make sure people understand how to use the system and kit

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Thank you

Rob Bristow [email protected]

079 1818 708 @robbristow