By Phil
14 November 2007
5:10 pm
One topic that continues to intrigue me is the relationship between the demand for bandwidth created by the applications we run and the bandwidth available in the networks we use. When these are out of alignment, the system is unbalanced and can create significant operational and user issues.
This thought process led to the Edholm's Law of Bandwidth 4 years ago and thoughts on how to manage delivery of content to different networks that a device might be connected to. You can click on the link to see the article published by the IEEE in 2004. I need to write a quick update to the Law of Bandwidth at some point, and I ...
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By Phil
1 November 2007
4:33 pm
I did a keynote address at the Insight 100 Fall Conference in Charlotte this week. The Insight 100 is the user group for customers deploying the Nortel CS2100 and SL-100 systems. There were over 100 customers from a wide variety of segments (finance, health care, government, education, etc.), typically with deployments from 20K plus at a single site to 200K with a centralized solution.
One interesting development that seemed to be taking place across the board is the use of a centralized model for new deployments. Much of the discussion was around the challenges of centralization and issues such as survivability and continuity.
Based on these interactions, I came to 2 conclusions:
The concept of a non-nodal VoIP system ...
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By Phil
30 October 2007
5:20 pm
The 2007 Norel Enterprise Vision series is now posted on the Nortel web site and available for viewing. The vision series consists of 7 video segments of about 20-25 minutes each that detail our vision of the industry and the path forward. The overall series can be seen at www.nortel.com/edholm-vision-series. (Update: Link fixed. Thanks Bruce.)
It includes the following areas (uses RealPlayer 8.0 or higher):
Module 1: Introduction and Business Drivers
Module 2: Technology Mega Trends and Hyperconnectivity
Module 3: Nortel Investing to Build on the Changes
Module 4: Architectural Philosophies and Convergence 2.0
Module 5: Unified Communications and ICA
Module 6: Video Collaboration and SOA
Module 7: ...
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By Phil
23 October 2007
7:41 pm
Back from vacation - in Santa Clara
As indicated in the last blog, different tasks require different communications modalities. If we plot relationship between the communicating parties on a vertical axis and different Communications modalities on the vertical, we can develop a plot of acceptable communications for different levels of relationship.
As can be seen, while Face to face is critical when there is little relationship, as we work together closely over a period of time we can use communications modalities that have lower content and eventually even non-real-time. This leads to identifying three "zones" of communications; the selling zone, the collaboration zone and the Grandma zone.
In the selling zone, ...
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By Phil
18 October 2007
1:32 pm
At Lake Tahoe - On vacation?
A question on one of my posts about travel caused me to think that a couple of blogs on how video (and other communication modalities) apply to different inter-human situations would be appropriate.
A number of years ago I came across the work of Alphonse Chapanis http://www-personal.umich.edu/~danhorn/chapanis.html and his investigations into how humans communicate as a reference model for machines. In 1974, he and Robert Ochnis published the paper; "The effects of 10 communication modes on the behavior of teams during co-operative problem-solving.” (International Journal of Man-Machine Studies 6: pgs. 579-619). This paper detailed research into how humans interacted when given a task and varying the interface between ...
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