VideoServer introsmultimedia unit

VideoServer last week unveiled its Central Office 2020 multimedia conference server, the first multipoint control unit to support simultaneous real-time audio, visual and document conferencing.

"Until now, people have mostly used videoconferencing for meetings or negotiations where it's important to see body language and facial expressions," said Jack O'Neill, vice president of marketing at

VideoServer. "This allows users to use videoconferencing for meetings that also require data sharing." While most servers allow users to see only one site at a time, Central Office 2020 enables each participate to see the other conference sites simultaneously. The server decompresses the video received from each site and builds the separate streams into a composite image, which it then recompresses and sends back to the end points.

A single Central Office 2020 can support up to 48 simultaneous users, and more than one server can be connected. Central Office 2020 can support T-1 speeds (1.544 Mb/s).

The server is targeted at carriers and high-end users and is the only videoconferencing server built to Bellcore specifications for central office equipment, O'Neill said.