AARNet trials free student videoconferencing
Australia’s Academic and Research Network, AARNet, plans to launch a free videoconferencing service for students, researchers and academics in 37 Australian universities and the CSIRO before the end of the year.The organisation today announced that it had partnered with ViVu, a US based videoconferencing and collaboration start-up, and launched a beta version of AARNet Anywhere. It has a handful of early trial participants, but is looking for 200-300 beta users of the system to help iron out any kinks.
AARNet has for many years offered its users a national videoconferencing service, but slots on that need to be booked – the intent with AARNet Anywhere is to allow anyone access to ad hoc videoconferencing for free.
ViVu was selected in part because of its relatively light and inexpensive approach to videoconferencing according to AARNet. It has developed VuRoom, which is an application that runs on Skype and allows up to eight people at a time to participate in a videoconference and collaborative work space.
According to the company’s ceo Sudha Valluru: “If you have a browser and a webcam, and can watch YouTube, you are video ready.”
Guido Aben, AARNet director of e-research, said that the organisations were working together on the project intended to “democratise videoconferencing” and promote inter and intra university collaboration.
Although the ViVu software can be downloaded for $US9.95 a month, AARNet hasn’t had to pay for the software as the two organisations are working together on how to scale the product over massive networks. Valluru, speaking to iTWire from the US, said that “We are looking at hundreds of thousand of users and want to scale up to millions.”AARNet is likely to provide a perfect test bed, with its fat 10Gbps communications network rolled out to key cities in Australia, and a 10 Gbps connection to the US West Coast. Video is now eating into bandwidth on many networks – but Aben was confident AARNet would not be challenged by the rollout of AARNet Anywhere.
“A good ViVu call might take 2-5Mbps. Aspirationally we’d like to look at even better quality, and the best of breed high definition runs on 8Mbps,” he explained. This meant AARNet would have sufficient bandwidth to support hundreds or thousands of concurrent videoconferences.
Although it will be up to individual universities to decide what their student population can do with the videoconferencing capability Aben said it was not AARNet’s intent to rigorously control what the service could be used for, only to provide the underpinning foundation for increased collaboration.
AARNet has for many years offered its users a national videoconferencing service, but slots on that need to be booked – the intent with AARNet Anywhere is to allow anyone access to ad hoc videoconferencing for free.
ViVu was selected in part because of its relatively light and inexpensive approach to videoconferencing according to AARNet. It has developed VuRoom, which is an application that runs on Skype and allows up to eight people at a time to participate in a videoconference and collaborative work space.
According to the company’s ceo Sudha Valluru: “If you have a browser and a webcam, and can watch YouTube, you are video ready.”
Guido Aben, AARNet director of e-research, said that the organisations were working together on the project intended to “democratise videoconferencing” and promote inter and intra university collaboration.
Although the ViVu software can be downloaded for $US9.95 a month, AARNet hasn’t had to pay for the software as the two organisations are working together on how to scale the product over massive networks. Valluru, speaking to iTWire from the US, said that “We are looking at hundreds of thousand of users and want to scale up to millions.”AARNet is likely to provide a perfect test bed, with its fat 10Gbps communications network rolled out to key cities in Australia, and a 10 Gbps connection to the US West Coast. Video is now eating into bandwidth on many networks – but Aben was confident AARNet would not be challenged by the rollout of AARNet Anywhere.
“A good ViVu call might take 2-5Mbps. Aspirationally we’d like to look at even better quality, and the best of breed high definition runs on 8Mbps,” he explained. This meant AARNet would have sufficient bandwidth to support hundreds or thousands of concurrent videoconferences.
Although it will be up to individual universities to decide what their student population can do with the videoconferencing capability Aben said it was not AARNet’s intent to rigorously control what the service could be used for, only to provide the underpinning foundation for increased collaboration.
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