Video links boom in the bust

The economic downturn has increased interest in videoconferencing as a way of reducing costs, according companies in the field.

Steve Collins, technical manager of partner alliances at Tandberg Data, says companies are looking for any way of reducing their operating costs, including their "T&Es" – travel and expenses.

Setting up a videoconference does not only save travel costs. "They also save on the time they have to spend out of the office," he said at the Unified Communications show in London.

Top executives in companies with leased lines can conference in fill 1080p high-definition video but less mortal can get high-quality calls via a PC, laptop or dedicated videophone.

But smaller companies can have the benefit of high-class video links on a pa-per-use basis through Tandberg partner, Collins said.

Fraser Dean, UK company manager of Vidyo, offers a "personal telepresence" service using Scalable Video Coding, an extension of the H.264 standard that offers high-quality video links over the Internet. Judging from the demo at the show, it is significantly better than the video quality you can expect from Skype.

He too says there has been a huge increase interest in the technology. " Especially when people realise they don't have to pay a fortune buying the equipment."

Vidyo sells its service, which use its own servers, through partners such as First Connections. Prices start at around £22 per user per month. It is not necessary for both people on a link to be Vidyo clients: subscribers can invite people on to a video conference through a browser.

Video calls are only one aspect of unified communications, which basically draw data networks, voice and mobile calls into a single infrastructure.

A major drawback which stopped many companies migrating from the old-steam phone was that there was a single point of failure: if the network went down, a company was out of business until the fault was repaired.

Now big enterprises have fallback systems. And Noel Bellen, EMEA business development manager of headset vendor Plantronics, says smaller companies are increasingly using 3G links as a fallback.

AVM, which makes the highly versatile Fritzbox routers, was showing a new model with an HSDPA USB dongle – useful for small companies or branch offices, even those not using unified communications, to maintain web access if a primary link goes down.