While most of us enjoy going to a remote island for vacation (maybe the Fiji islands?), we appreciate some good infrastructure and transportation alternatives, knowing that we always can get back home.
The same principle applies for most of us in the business world. We don’t want to be deserted on an island that puts limits on the way we conduct business, interact and cooperate with other organizations.
Companies implementing video conferencing often experience low utilization and adaption rates. In our view, this is due to two types of islands (keeping issues related to system interoperability aside):
The company island
For most companies, the initial roll-out of video conferencing has an internal scope with the ROI mainly being related to travel reduction related to internal meetings. Endpoints are installed in different meeting rooms and offices and software clients may be deployed to some or all employees. Due to the nature of such implementations with an internal scope, companies choose to utilize (or upgrade) their existing LAN and WAN. The island works perfect for internal calls but for external and B2B video calls (locally and globally) they often face challenges related to the lack of DNS set up for URI dialing or firewall settings.
The network island
Some organizations have connected the company island to a third-party network island enabling video conferencing between multiple company islands (assuming they subscribe to the same network island). The network island solution is perfect when having a predetermined calling pattern but does not accommodate calling to arbitrary destinations as each arbitrary endpoint requires a dedicated link to one of the network island’s Points of Presence (POP), which typically takes 45-60 days to set up.
The ocean connecting all islands
In the spirit of our island analogy, Media Network Services (MNS) represents the ocean connecting all islands. MNS operates a Global Network Service dedicated and optimized for HD video conferencing between arbitrary destinations, making it a great supplement to existing closed networks when wanting to call global and B2B.
The uniqueness of MNS is its fully meshed and redundant carrier grade network with 50+ PoPs around the world combined with MNS operating as an ISP in all regions, peering with all other local ISPs. The advantage is that a company island can get an immediate global footprint for internal, external and B2B HD video conferencing, simply by using its local ISP as last mile. It is sufficient that only one participating endpoint is subscribing to MNS. If connected to MNS, an endpoint on the company island can call to any other endpoint connected to the internet with a HD quality previously only experienced on closed high capacity networks.
To learn more about the various network alternatives for video conferencing, we recommend reading the CIO Guide to Video Conferencing Network.
