Perhaps you are working from home today as well as the next couple of weeks.  The risk of meeting in person has grown, but business must still move forward.  In most office settings the tools already exist to support this via video and web conferencing. 

Web conferencing has revolutionized how we can conduct business.  Also called virtual meetings, they play a vital role in allowing face-to-face communication, even for companies thousands of miles apart, all while saving time and travel cost.  Web conferencing hasn’t always been this easy, as it used to require expensive software, a time-consuming setup, and sometimes additional hardware.  We are becoming more accustomed to virtual meetings since we can get immediate reactions from body language and gain much more through visual communication than a phone call might be able to achieve.  These tools also allow us to share content directly with others, to collaborate with digital pointers and pens that everyone can pick up and use during a presentation or discussion. 

But now all we really need is a browser to get connected to one another.  Platforms started with WebRTC to add video, voice and chat in a clientless fashion with no need for additional downloads, software or plug-ins.  For businesses looking for an easy-to-use conferencing solution, most can be deployed company-wide without the need for training or extra demand on the network and no need for additional server hardware or extra bandwidth. 

While the meetings are setup and configured locally, the actual meeting is streamed via data centers, again saving customer the need for additional bandwidth.  And as the ease of web conferencing has encouraged its growth, more data centers have pivoted to support these applications.  Even as 4K screens and broadcasting is accelerating, the data center networks have grown to match the need for extreme action video recording and high-efficiency video coding (HEVC) standards.  More are anticipating that this will soon be the norm, with high resolution of streaming, virtual meetings, and more are supported by all devices, in every setting, and the latest data centers and networks have responded to meet that anticipated demand. 

Posted in: IoT, Network

Filed under: bandwidth, Coronavirus, COVID, COVID-19, HEVC, network, web conference, WebRTC