Communications go green for COP17

Neotel, together with Cisco and Dimension Data, is providing telepresence capabilities at the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17), in Durban.

“In keeping with COP17's climate change agenda, the telepresence rooms at the event will provide 20 000 delegates access to a game-changing collaboration tool that makes a significant impact on climate change via a reduced carbon footprint,” says Neotel.

According to statistics, operating a telepresence room for one year has the same carbon footprint as a one-way transatlantic flight, and uses the same amount of energy as the ton of jet fuel that a jumbo jet burns between boarding and take off.

“IT and networking are key for the conference,” says Henrik Kjaer, global project lead on COP17 for Cisco.

Cisco first provided its telepresence capabilities at the 2009 COP15 in Copenhagen, and over 150 telepresence meetings were held, accounting for over 250 hours of meeting time.

“These involved high-profile meetings between delegates and their ministries, as well as meetings with peers and media briefings.”

Kjaer says the network infrastructure at the Durban ICC had to be built from scratch for the conference.

“We were involved from the very beginning of the project, and we were very forthcoming about the fact that we felt the service provider should be Neotel and its parent company Tata Communications. Ample bandwidth is extremely important for an event like this.”

Neotel MD and CEO Sunil Joshi says: “Neotel is the only service provider in SA that can provide domestic and international connectivity with the exceptional high performance bandwidth capacity required for such technologies to be leveraged at such an event.”

The telepresence rooms at COP17 are connected via Neotel to the Tata Communications Global Meeting Exchange.

In terms of the telepresence services, Kjaer says there are two types of solutions available at the conference. Desk units can be used to connect to any video conferencing system globally, and this is reliant on the available Internet connection.

“We also have our immersive telepresence solution in place, and this includes a stage in Durban for coverage of keynotes and roundtables. There are also three rooms that have been built to allow for participants to connect to any of the 36 Tata public telepresence suites and 119 Cisco meeting rooms around the world.

“What we want to project is that this technology is probably one of the more sustainable tools to implement. As humans, we are visually communicating animals, so to be able to have face-to-face collaboration virtually is really a great tool,” says Kjaer.

“As an IT company, we are firm believers in the ability of IT and networking to transform communities and countries. A conference like this is a testament to that.

“If the people at COP17 can't reach out and disseminate the information that comes out of the discussions, it will reflect badly on SA as a host, on the UN and on COP as a whole. So bandwidth is key.”