Equant to offer global IP video-conferencing service

Equant today announced its intention to launch a global IP video conferencing solution in 85 countries over the international transport carrier’s global multi-protocol label switching network. Equant is partnering with Polycom to provide video conferencing terminals and Genesys Conferencing to provide the service itself.

Video conferencing traffic will be directed from customer transmission lines directly onto Equant’s MPLS backbone, which designates five priority classes for packets traversing the network. The highest priority packets will be IP voice and video, ensuring little or no packet loss latency or jitter even over the great distances required in international conferencing.

Equant Senior Vice President of Data and IP Products Gopi Gopinath said several of Equant’s customers have been employing separate IP video conferencing solutions with success, so it was only natural for Equant to provide its own managed service with partners Polycom Genesys. The cost savings for IP video conferencing over ISDN services are sizable, especially between Internationally remote sites where high international per-minute rates compound. Gopinath estimated any customer that uses more than 8 hours of video conferencing services a month would save money using IP versus going with ISDN. They would also save the expense of provisioning ISDN lines, running the video traffic over its data connection.

Currently Gopinath is running the service to customers served by T-1 lines and above. While there are some IP video conferencing solutions available over DSL, the difficulties in getting the necessary service level agreements for IP video from all of its carrier partners in 81 countries prevents Equant from standardizing the service throughout its DSL footprint.