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Friday, 08 January 2010
Cisco aims at consumer videoconferencing. So does Polycom… 

Cisco has used demonstrations at the giant Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas to signal a serious move into consumer telepresence. The company believes that a combination of broadband access and existing HDTV technology can deliver a natural video communication experience in the living room.

Cisco will kick off US home telepresence field trials this spring, with Verizon as an early partner. Home telepresence field trials in France will start later in 2010, with France Telecom as Cisco's early partner.

"With Cisco's best-in-class telepresence technology and networks such as Verizon's advanced, all-fibre-optic network, we believe we will deliver a video communication experience to consumers unlike anything they've seen before," avers Marthin DeBeer, senior vice president and general manager, Cisco's Emerging Technologies group. "Home telepresence will make a difference in consumers' lives by allowing them to enjoy natural video communications with family and friends wherever they are located. To ensure that early home telepresence users will have plenty of friends and family to communicate with, in addition to calling other home telepresence users, they will be able to place calls to PCs using a webcam and video chat service."

Also heading off down the domestic video communications trail at the CES was Polycom. In this company’s demo, partnered by IBM, cloud computing was part of the proposition.

You can see why there might be interest. After all, in the business arena telepresence has become Cisco’s fastest-growing emerging technology in just three years. But even given the special factors at work in the enterprise space, there are doubters. One is ABI Research. One of that company’s predictions for 2010 is that telepresence will NOT become mainstream. “The telepresence market has been helped by skyrocketing travel costs, but serious lack of interoperability in hardware and in software among vendors will continue to hamper growth, as will the cost of the equipment,” opines the ABI analysis ‘What’s NOT Going to Happen in 2010’.
John Williamson
 
 
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