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Videoconferencing: a new NREN service


Johannesburg, 03 Jul 2015

TENET (the South African NREN operator) is pleased to announce that it is now offering a new videoconferencing service to South African tertiary education and research organisations.

The service, which uses the platform provided by Vidyo, effectively offers these communities in South Africa a 'private cloud' of collaboration opportunities.

Vidyo is one of the new breed of software based videoconferencing platforms that does away with the MCU bottleneck of H.323/SIP-based systems and works instead by intelligently routing media traffic to the endpoints in the meeting. Running on a virtualised platform on the SANREN network, the TENET Vidyo offering allows up to HD conferencing with multiple participants and the ability to share high quality content into the meeting.

"The TENET Vidyo service offers a step change in the availability of collaboration opportunities," says Geoff Hoy, TENET's Services Manager. "By taking videoconferencing out of the expensively equipped room-based environments, we are enabling people to have high quality meetings from just about anywhere".

Vidyo offers a range of options for connecting, from room systems, desktop clients for MacOS, Windows and Linux, as well as apps for mobile platforms. Because this is a software product, everything is available as software, including the room systems.

Vidyo also works with generic off-the-shelf peripherals, thus reducing the cost of providing meeting rooms with high-quality cameras and audio setups, and allowing a number of modular, upgradable options to help with tight budgets.

Because the Vidyo infrastructure is virtualised, TENET is able to establish key components in separate parts of South Africa to optimise the users' experience. TENET is exploring extending the reach of the service with other African NRENs, which will be enabled by deploying Vidyo infrastructure locally.

TENET is also working with a number of organisations on a hybrid cloud model - where some of the components of the service will reside on the SANREN network, while others are onsite in the university or research organisations. This is a useful approach for supporting the requirements that these organisations have for bridging to H.323/SIP devices.

Some early use cases for this service have included a trial of Telemedicine with staff from the Red Cross War Memorial Children's Hospital and in facilitating the sharing of expertise in mathematics and statistics among South African universities. The service is also being put to use by the SKA in South Africa and scientists working at CERN who use a setup that feeds directly into the wider CERN community across the world.

"Vidyo has been the technology choice of a number of NRENs across the world", says TENET's Rob Bristow. "In addition, the experience of CERN shows that Vidyo is platform that will scale both in terms of connected users and size of meetings".

Vidyo is being offered to all institutions and organisations that are connected to the SANREN network.

For more information contact Rob Bristow at TENET - r.bristow@tenet.ac.za

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Editorial contacts

Rob Bristow
TENET
r.bristow@tenet.ac.za