Christine Perey's Lab

Lab overview: The lab at PEREY Research & Consulting is focused entirely on establishing the value and testing the features of products and services addressing networked video, voice and data for enterprise communications and collaboration.

We test video and rich media over IP solutions, particularly technologies providing business quality experiences in less than 1 Mbps bandwidth. Our infrastructure and test beds span both the streaming media (live streaming and on demand) and the interactive multimedia conferencing technologies. We have a complete H.323 network and are developing infrastructure to permit testing and evaluation of SIP-based real time communications platforms. Under contract, our lab provides objective, detailed and actionable feedback to vendors developing products/services and solutions for enterprise video communications.

We also assist enterprise customers who are writing requests for information or requests for proposals, evaluating technologies for deployment in their own networks and/or have deployment and management challenges associated with their existing video networking systems.

Equipment in the lab: Five group videoconferencing systems and monitors, from Polycom, VCON and TANDBERG; numerous, diverse personal conferencing technologies with industry standard cameras and microphones, Cisco 2600 routers, Cisco Gigabit Ethernet switches, ATM and T1 interfaces, STARBAK Torrent VCG, Sonic Foundry MediaSite Live, RADVISION voice and video gateways and multipoint conferencing server, Compaq and Dell servers, 10 PCs on various network segments.

Software in the lab: Windows 98 SE, Windows XP, Windows NT, Windows 2000 Pro, Windows 2000, Linux Red Hat, Gatekeepers (RADVISION and VCON MXM), VCON VCB, FVC Click to Meet Express, Windows servers, Real Networks servers

Expanded resources: Partnerships with streaming media service providers, videoconferencing service providers and third party consulting companies (e.g., www.hampton-james.com; www.netforecast.com; www.harpermedia.com) assist us to test hosted applications with internally deployed solutions.

Network Connections: PEREY Research & Consulting's Lab has 4 ISDN lines for testing various circuit switched technologies, DSL, Cable and T1 to the Internet. Internal networks include 10 Mbps and Gigabit Ethernet. The company also uses a drop from a private videoconferencing network operated by Wire One. Glowpoint is offers a managed enterprise video service for guaranteed quality of service over IP calling between Glowpoint connected devices and with ISDN-based videoconferencing systems through IP-ISDN gateways.

Personnel: Christine Perey is the principal researcher and performs all tests and evaluations at this facility.

Lab specific URLs: www.perey.com

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