5 Video at other locations

There have been requests from NRAO staff for:

• a ``video phone booth" capability (i.e., a one-person video facility) so that we do not tie up a site's main conference room for video meetings that only one or two people will attend,

• video conferencing to operations sites, specifically the VLA Site and VLBA antenna sites.

Successful video conferencing requires both adequate bandwidth and good quality-of-service assurance throughout the network. To ensure good video and uninterrupted audio performance, each video conferencing system must be on its own dedicated subnet. It is also desirable to set precedence bits in the packet traffic to obtain priority in routers, etc. Increased deployment of video conferencing at the NRAO must be tied to appropriate network infrastructure improvements.

It should be possible to meet these requirements for a video connection to the VLA Site in the near future (the hardware to support this is now being requisitioned). We also plan to add a further system in a small conference room at Green Bank. A portable unit, able to work with any Win2000 PC to provide a ``video phone" with the same video and audio quality as our existing systems, will also be evaluated for future use.

It will be impractical to extend video conferencing to the VLBA antenna sites while they have their current narrow-bandwidth connections to the NRAO. If improved connectivity to VLBA sites becomes affordable, point-to-point video conferencing between the AOC and VLBA antenna sites might become an interesting option.

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