News for and about the Internet2 community

[Ryan Bass <>]

Internet2 Commons Announces New Service To Enable Interoperable Telepresence 
Bridging

Ann Arbor, MI – February 22, 2011 – Today, Internet2 announced a substantial 
improvement to its real time collaboration offerings through a recent 
investment in Cisco TelePresence Server infrastructure.  Leveraging the 
Telepresence Interoperability Protocol (TIP) standard, the new equipment will 
enable Cisco TelePresence to interoperate with standards based SIP and H.323 
videoconferencing. Additionally, the Cisco TelePresence Video Communication 
Servers will provide multiprotocol dialing and reachability. 

The new hardware will provide a valuable refresh and expansion for 
Internet2’s real time collaboration infrastructure as it significantly 
expands the existing bridging, dialing, and reachability capabilities that 
enable participants to schedule and hold distributed meetings, conferences, 
classes, and working groups, in support of research and education. Internet2 
provides real time collaborations services like these through its Commons 
service.

The new equipment will be utilized along with the existing Internet2 Commons 
infrastructure not only to revamp and expand current service offerings, but 
also to bring the existing community of standards based SIP and H.323 
videoconferencing endpoints together with Cisco TelePresence endpoints. The 
latter will be accomplished in conjunction with the unified Research and 
Education (R&E) Cisco TelePresence Exchange, jointly operated by Internet2 
and National LambdaRail (NLR) to facilitate reachability for Cisco 
TelePresence in the R&E community.

Internet2 director of technology Mike LaHaye said, “This new capability 
allows Internet2 to continue our leadership role of video and real-time 
collaboration offerings in the R&E community by linking members and their 
partners together independent of their videoconferencing environment.  The 
new capabilities clearly bring more value to members who currently utilize 
different forms of telepresence, while providing a scalable, cost-effective 
gateway for members who have not yet deployed telepresence in their 
organizations.”

“With the growth of video communications across all segments of education, it 
is great to see the Internet2 - NLR unified Research and Education Cisco 
TelePresence Exchange continuing to deploy new services to meet the 
increasing video needs of the R& E community”, said Dave West, senior 
director, public sector, architectures and engineering, Cisco.

At the Internet2 2010 Fall Member Meeting, a demonstration of these 
capabilities was presented to showcase the multi-vendor, multi-screen 
interoperability features supported by the Cisco TelePresence Server. The 
demonstration showcased a mix of single and multi-screen rooms, low-latency 
stream switching, and stream adaptation for optimized results and firewall 
traversal. This demonstration also connected to the existing unified Research 
and Education Cisco TelePresence Exchange to highlight additional 
interoperability options.

David Devereaux-Weber, network consultant at The University of Wisconsin – 
Madison said: “Cisco TelePresence brings a number of significant improvements 
to the world of video collaboration.  Concurrently, the Research and 
Education community has invested a lot of time and money developing 
infrastructure for video conferencing.  This effort by Internet2 will offer a 
bridge between the world of H.323 and TelePresence and video conferencing.  
These new capabilities protect existing video conference investments and 
offer interoperability between them and the new TelePresence facilities."

At the Winter 2011 ESCC/Internet2 Joint Techs Meeting from January 30 - 
February 3, 2011, Internet2 director of technology, Mike LaHaye, presented a 
joint session with Indiana University network engineer, Brent Sweeny, where 
they provided more details about the R&E Cisco TelePresence Exchange.  
Additional details about the service will be forthcoming in the next few 
months.  For information on these new services contact:  


About Internet2

Internet2 is an advanced networking consortium led by the research and 
education community. An exceptional partnership spanning U.S. and 
international institutions who are leaders in the worlds of research, 
academia, industry and government, Internet2 is developing breakthrough 
cyberinfrastructure technologies that support the most exacting applications 
of today—and spark the most essential innovations of tomorrow. 
http://www.internet2.edu.

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Contact:
Ryan Bass
Internet2