[cisco-voip] Who is doing IP video Telephony?

[Jeffrey Ollie]

On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 11:39 AM, Scott Voll <svoll.voip at gmail.com> wrote:
> We as many other places are feeling the pinch of gas prices.  as a result we
> are looking at pushing Video across the agency to help in reducing travel
> cost between sites.
>
> point to point Video telephony is a no brainer.  but we are looking to add
> conferencing.  Which MCU would others recommend for conferencing purposes?
>
> I don't know if it's an option but we would also love to use it for our H323
> endpoints so we can continue to do our state wide conferencing but also be
> able to use our VTA with it also.  is this an option?

We are (or will shortly) be using a Cisco 3540 MCU in SCCP mode to
provide video conferencing for our VT advantage endpoints so that you
can use the conference button on the phone to set up a video
conference.  We also have a Tandberg MCU as well as licence keys for
the mini-MCUs built into some of our Tandberg endpoints for
H.323/room-based video conferencing.  H.323 gatekeeper controlled
trunks have been set up on our Callmanager to provide gateways between
the systems.  It's not a perfect solution, but it gets us by until we
figure something better out.

The 3540s have a option to split their resources between SCCP and
H.323 but the split is not dynamic - you have to dedicate resources to
either side.  The 3540 model we have is EOL - I'm not sure what Cisco
has to replace it.  In any case, on our H.323 VC stuff having a
Tandberg MCU works out much better since we use mostly Tandberg
endpoints and Tandberg's management/scheduling server.

Jeff