Cisco Demos Public Rooms For Telepresence 65
CWmike writes "Matt Hamblen reports that Cisco Systems Inc. has announced the first telepresence videoconferencing rooms available for public use. It demonstrated the technology simultaneously in four locations in India, the US and the UK Three of the four demonstration sites were retrofitted rooms in Taj Hotels in London, Bangalore, India and Boston. The luxury hotel chain will build the videoconferencing rooms for business and guest use at rates starting at $400 an hour in the Boston location. Cisco said prices will vary from $299 to $899 an hour at various locations globally, depending on the number of users. The rooms can accommodate from one to 18 people."
Re:How about Meeting In Person? (Score:5, Insightful)
You can fly 18 people to India for $899?
Cheapest tickets out there are $1200/person.
With telepresence you can get 2 rooms for $1800 and have a meeting with 36 people, or you can fly 18 of them out for $16,182 and have a bunch of cranky people that had to take 24 hour flights and deal with international travel hassles
$400 an hour? Oh really? (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's see, I've done some video of my own, using a web cam that cost me $12. (Granted, it was only 15fps, but for extreme low cost it would fit the bill and my 30fps camera set me back a whopping $175.) Now, there's some cost for an Internet connection and maybe the TV they're providing is an expensive $3,000 flat screen, but as I see it, the reason you use teleconferencing is to save money, not to spend more than it costs to go there in person.
This is like, oh, 1980s pricing when telecommunications links were extremely expensive and companies would be willing to spend money on new toys and people didn't know what the real cost of an international video connection was. Most people in business see enough video over the Internet to realize that the cost to deliver even high-quality video is not extreme. Thus they're going to realize these prices are way too high and they're not buying it.
Of course! I'm forgetting! This is the rack rate, the advertised rate a hotel claims to charge if you walk up to the desk and ask for a room that day, you get reamed up the anus for the maximum possible rate. Expect the rate claimed to be severely discounted, even for very short advance notice. No one will use it otherwise. Might work at $100 an hour or $400 a day but I seriously don't think it's going to work at $400 an hour.
Let's see, and my numbers may be wrong but let me make an estimate. I can ignore salaries because you're paying them the same whether their butt is sitting in a chair in, say, DC or in Hong Kong. Since I know some of these prices I can give an example.
Say you have to send four people to a meeting in Seoul. (I know it doesn't list there as a place but I'm presuming one will be there eventually if they want it to be successful.) KAL from DC or New York to Seoul, South Korea is around $800 each way per person. Hotel probably adds the same per day for the team. (One room for male members, one room for female ones.) Add another $400 for per diem. So for a seven-day meeting to negotiate a contract, it's going to cost $6400, plus $5600 for the rooms, plus another $5600 for feeding them, etc. That's $17,500. Add in $2200 each for their salaries plus G&A for the 4 days they're sitting on a plane not working (plane trip each way plus some time before and after to recover from jet lag), add another $2,000 for bribes and unexpected expenses (yes, I know technically bribes are illegal, but in some places you have no choice or you can't get business done at all) and it totals $27,600 for the trip and your people even got to visit South Korea during off-hours.
Now, you're sticking them in front of a video room for 6 hours a day, that's $4,800 each day (presumably you have to pay the other side's conference room cost, the use of telepresence is for your convenience, not theirs, it wouldn't cost them anything to have the meeting in person at their offices), and in a week, that's $33,600 and your people ain't even gotten a free junket out of it so there's no appreciation for the company (and no friendly competition among your people to get that juicy trip at company expense.) And some of these travel expenses might be negotiable. Plus, if you aren't in a city where their video conference rooms are, you have an expense to go there, reducing any alleged "savings" over the cost of travel.
Besides, if video conferencing was so much better, people'd be using their own computers and doing it over the Internet for a cost equivalent probably to the first one hour Cisco wants to charge. I don't know about you, but I think you can do a fairly decent videoconference over a 764K internet connection, and that's what Verizon is offering me for $19.95 a month, and their commercial DSL is 3mbps for $42.95 a month.
Let me tell you, I did a so-so videoconference with a friend, using a web cam, oh, about, ten, twelve years ago, me in Arlington, Virginia, 4 miles from Washington D.C., friend was in Colorado, audio was so so and video was
Re:$400 an hour? Oh really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Funniest post I have read in a while.
You clearly have never seen what the setup is like to use.
You should go to the movie industry and tell them they dont have to spend 30 million a film when you can do similar things with the video recorder on your mobile phone and a PC. It's about the same thing.