Video in the Enterprise

Is your IT department ready for video in the enterprise?  Streaming video applications are on the rise as more organizations are using video conferencing and video for training and educational programs. This increase in video posts new challenges to network professionals whose job is to maintain delivery of critical services over the network. A recent Cisco study predicts that by 2013, 55% of all corporate traffic will be video, a dramatic change in the composition of information on the corporate network from what is currently there.

Most network engineers just treat video as another application on their network and that may be sufficient in the early stages. The business case for corporate video is so strong, however, that, at some point, most network engineers will be responsible for delivering reliable, high-quality video across their network.   Unfortunately, the combination of significant bandwidth requirements and the real-time nature of video, means that your network and toolkit may not be up to the task.   The first step is to understand the fundamentals of video running on IP networks and the second is being prepared to support and troubleshoot it.

 

Video may seem like voice because it is a real-time application however it behaves much differently.  It takes much greater bandwidth, can be less forgiving of network impairments than voice, the media stream is more complex than the voice stream, and there are more varieties of video than voice. Video is more sensitive to loss and jitter; watch the 1% and 3% loss videos to see how loss impacts the quality of video.
1% loss video example	3% loss video example

Download Guide to Deploying and Troubleshooting Video