From tony@ing.iac.es
Date: Thu, 6 Feb 1997 14:19:04 +0000 (GMT)
From: Tony Povoas 
To: "Steve Unger, Director ING" 
Cc: Gary Mitchell , Basil Hassan 
Subject: Re: ATM to La Palma - A quick question (fwd)

I doubt the feasability of using an ATM link to the UK for video conferencing.

The nature of video means you have to have a guaranteed throughput or quality degrades to the level where audio/video get out of sync, miss large numbers of frames etc.

ATM gives the ability to reserve bandwidth for a particular channel/application, thus guaranteed high quality audio/video. To reserve the bandwidth a virtual circuit has to be configured. With Diegos co-operation we could thus guarantee this to La Laguna. To get it to the UK would require an agreement with those running all the networks between here and there, RedIRIS, DANTE, UKERNA and possibly others.

Higher speeds on unreserved bandwidth might make video possible but this would be a question of getting lucky with network traffic between here and the UK rather than a guaranteed service. The other danger with unreserved bandwidth is the M25 scenario where increased bandwidth just generates more users/traffic and the congestion is bad as ever.

Nonetheless much of both the Spanish and UK academic/research community is actively moving to ATM and it makes a lot of sense not to have a bottleneck getting traffic into/out of our site!

Tony

On Thu, 6 Feb 1997, Steve Unger, Director ING wrote: ...
On Thu, 6 Feb 1997, Gary Mitchell wrote: ...