Can You (See and) Hear Me Now?

by: Elizabeth Gardner

SAY THE WORD "VIDEOCONFERENCING," AND for many of us, you'll evoke thoughts of a herky-jerky picture with fuzzy and badly synchronized audio, continually interrupted by network congestion, temperamental equipment, and other inexplicable technical difficulties-in short, a pale and unsatisfactory substitute for a face-to-face meeting.

But within 10 years, say the pundits, videoconferencing for the masses will be as simple and seamless as using e-mail or talking on the phone, with better picture quality than your favorite TV show, and audio quality good enough for the enjoyment of a symphony concert. Participants at dozens, even hundreds, of sites will interact as easily as if they were in the same room.

Higher education won't have to wait that long, however. Even now, students, faculty, and staff at U.S. colleges and universities are experiencing:

Here Comes Internet2
The agent is Internet2 (www.internet2.edu), bearing just about the same relationship to the commercial Internet that a water main does to the average kitchen faucet. Internet2 started out in 1996 as the exclusive province of research, funded by about 200 large universities which each kicked in $500,000 per year to fund a network backbone called Abilene. These universities have also spent hundreds of thousands-sometimes millions-to upgrade their internal networks in order to take advantage of the big pipeline coming in.

Internet2's purpose was to expand the frontiers of computer networking and provide a way for researchers to quickly and easily swap enormous databases and image files. In November 2002, an international team used Internet2 to set a new record for data transmission by sending 6.7 gigabytes of data-the equivalent of two feature-length movies on DVD-across almost 7,000 miles in less than a minute. That's about 3,500 times faster than a home broadband Internet connection.

Still, the more bandwidth, the more uses people find for it, and videoconferencing has become another focus. "It's not just the traditional talking heads anymore," says Internet2 spokesman Greg Wood. "Now we can serve artists and musicians who haven't been able to get the quality they needed." True to his words, the last Internet2 users' conference featured a dance performance by two troupes hundreds of miles apart, which interacted with one another's images on huge video monitors as they performed.

"It's hard to remember the quaint early days of e-mail, where you had to deal with multiple systems and getting through gateways, and it was just a pain," says Wood. "But the same thing is happening now with videoconferencing: It was a challenge a few years ago to get it to work at all, and now the greater bandwidth of the network gives you pretty good quality video. We're no longer trying to compensate for the shortcomings of the network. Instead, we're using videoconferencing to extend classrooms and bring lecturers in. It's getting to be as easy as e-mail."

"It's much more compelling for large group-to-group scaling," says Ted Hanss, director of Applications Development at Internet2. "The images are of very high quality. If you're talking on a complex topic, you can see a student's furrowed brow. If you're taking a violin lesson, the instructor can see that you're holding your bow too tightly."

Beyond the IHE Classroom
It soon became clear that with a capacity of 10 gigabits per second, Internet2 had plenty of bandwidth to spare. In 2001, the original members started the K20 initiative, to extend the use of the network to K-12 schools, community colleges, libraries, and museums. Any of these institutions can piggyback on the connections of Internet2 members, as long as they're willing to make the necessary improvements in their infrastructure.

State educational data networks in 25 states are also participating, so a school in any of those states may be able to get connected to Internet2 that way. For example, Oklahoma's Onenet is providing Internet2 connectivity to virtually all of the state's IHEs. (Two state institutions, Oklahoma State and the University of Oklahoma, are full-fledged Internet2 members.)

Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, interest has grown in alternatives to attending meetings and conferences in person. "We've started to videoconference all our meetings," says Kurt Snodgrass, executive director of Onenet. "We used to have people driving county by county for the department of health. Now they broadcast their meetings [via Internet2] and store the broadcast on their Web page for playback."

"It's not a replacement for travel, but it's an intermediate step between the phone and the plane," says Wood. "If everyone can save one or two trips a year, it pays for itself."

A Serious-We Mean Serious-Commitment
Connecting to Internet2 isn't a cheap or casual decision. The networking fees alone can run between thousands and tens of thousands of dollars per month, says Wood, depending on the location of a campus and what kind of connectivity is already in place. A college also has to commit to overhauling its internal networks-a capital cost which can run into six or seven figures.

The good news is that once the network is in shape, installing videoconference equipment is a bargain compared to a few years ago. "Five years ago, the basic cost of equipping a classroom was $40,000 to $80,000," says Michael Baker, VP of vertical markets for Polycom, one of the largest vendors of videoconferencing equipment to higher education. "Today," he says, "you can do the same thing for $10,000." For $60,000, he adds, you can buy a top-of-the-line setup, including individual microphones for 30 students, monitors, a control board, and an electronic whiteboard.

Baker predicts a not-so-far-off future of full integration, where an indisposed student with a well-equipped laptop can attend any class via videoconference-all without leaving his sickbed (or the beach). If, against all odds, he misses the class anyway, he can always replay it at the course Web site.