Tandberg announced today that its entire product line (endpoints, MCUs and gateways) will all have H.264 support by the end of October. Currently, the company's videoconferencing endpoints are shipping with H.264 built in with MCU and gateways getting the functionality later this month. Current customers should be able to download a software upgrade to get H.264 support. For those that haven't followed the new standard, H.264's creators tout it can deliver the same quality video as its predecessor but at half the bandwidth.
For some users, H.264 (in any vendor product) could result in a tremendous cost savings. One user I spoke with this week said some international calls run about $12 minute for a 384K bit/sec call that uses six bonded ISDN lines. By using H.264, he hopes to eliminate two of the lines (a savings of $4 per minute) while still increasing video quality.
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