Neotel introduced its telepresence facility yesterday, creating the 10th of its kind for the Tata group globally.
The company has made the $500 000 room available for the general public to rent; however, there is a considerable cost to make a teleconference call for an hour. While the company has not set the actual rental price, Neotel staff members say it could cost roughly R4 500 for an hour on air.
Neotel's head of product and solutions, Rajeev Sinha, says the offering will be on a pay per use model and is the first of its kind in Africa. Neotel's parent company, Tata, has built similar solutions across the globe and hopes to expand the public telepresence rooms to 20 over the next few years.
The company aims to capture New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Toronto, in the Americas; Singapore, Tokyo and Hong Kong in the East; and Sydney, in Australia. The company says the Johannesburg room is the only public room planned for Africa.
The technology includes a full video and audio set-up by Cisco, which - according to Sinha - cost roughly $300 000. The rooms are designed to resemble a boardroom and the three-screen full HD equipment is intended to create the feeling that the dial-in members are actually at the table.
According to Sinha, the room can be heavy on bandwidth, taking up to 19MB to connect. However, he says smaller set-ups with fewer screens can take less bandwidth. Neotel is targeting big business, with worldwide offices, as customers for the offering.
In a recent report, Gartner predicted the world economic crisis will boost HD-based video meetings, with companies trying to cut costs.
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