Acknowledgements

Were it not for the strong support of several exceptional individuals, the manufacturers of these videoconferencing systems, Ganymede Software and Nortel Networks, this study would have stopped far short of its potential. Tim Siglin, principal of Century 7 and a Perey Research & Consulting associate, was an enthusiastic collaborator through the entire project. He received the same mountain of boxes that we received in California, then set up, configured and replicated many tests with identical systems in his Tullahoma, Tenn., office. Tim's high video and audio quality standards, careful review of manuals and thorough testing of data conferencing features revealed details that factored into our assessment of these systems.

All five of the manufacturers' representatives were exceptional in their cooperation and service, in some cases going to great lengths to make sure that their equipment performed at its best in the course of these tests, or simply that we had what we needed. We asked one systems engineer, VTEL's Jeremy Glen, to resolve a problem we found insurmountable, and with only 12 hours notice he traveled 600 miles to do so. A product manager from Sony took a day from his Thanksgiving vacation to drive and hand-deliver one of only two LAN-ready systems in the country to our test site in Tennessee. When we needed extra monitors, we got them. When a hard drive failed, a new one was shipped for Saturday delivery to Placerville (to which Fed Ex does not deliver on Saturdays). The Escort needed for the LAN-WAN testing was provided completely configured and ready to go, saving us enormous cost and valuable time.

Greg Leduc, of VIPswitch Inc. in Montreal, Canada, traveled to California on a moment's notice and played an instrumental role in equipment setup, configuration, and ISDN performance assessments.

Steve Roe, VP of Ridgeway Networks, provided encouragement when our IP WAN options seemed few. His ideas and the networking expertise of engineers in Ridgeway helped us to continue thinking outside of the ISDN-IP box, although in the end we did not utilize the Ridgeway equipment.

Kim Shorb of Ganymede Software without delay sent us the industry's best network load generator. Chariot played a vital role in emulating a real-world multimedia networking environment.

Finally, the author could not have performed the most critical tests without and is enormously indebted to Dennis Cote, Vice President of Nortel Networks. Upon hearing of our efforts from Willis Chun, Dennis offered the expert services of Michael Dupuis and Ken Thomas, also of Nortel Networks. Michael missed an awards ceremony in which he was to be honored for outstanding contributions to his company's advanced networks to pull together and accompany to Placerville the most valuable set of network resources with which WAN testing was made possible.