Radvision Scopia 400/1000 & Lifesize ?

[MCN]

Hi all,

I was wondering if anyone has installed LifeSize endpoints with one of their MCU's or the RadVision Scopia 400 / 1000.

Are you happy with the quality of the calls?

I trawled many sites and have read numerous forums (including this one) about
* loss of port count - ie. 8 ports to do encode
* if you use AES it is 50% loss for port count.
* the MCU only sends a single video stream back to all participants which impacts call quality of there is packet loss at one site.
* you can only run one HD conference per blade on the Scopia 400 / 1000 so if you want 4 concurrent conferences you need another Scopia 400 or more blades in the Scopia 1000.
* when cascading calls accross MCU's or blades you don;t see all parties in a conference.
* various other things but won't bore you with the so called list.

While these are all important statements (actually pretty important)- I am looking for real customer / user feedback.

If you have implemented the Rad / LS MCU for HD calls;
Do these issue's really impact you?
Are your users happy with the experience?
Are you happy that you selected the LS / Rad MCU?
How did the installation go? Any issues to look out for?
Has anyone (reseller / manufacturer) over promised and under delivered?

Please - I do not need manufacturers marketing hype - I want to hear from real customers / users.

thanks
MCN

[ivot]

Hi, I've just attended a Radvision Scopia video meeting/presentation regarding an ongoing multimedia project we work on. Presentation was performed by Radvision staff directly and it was shinny allright, but my final mark is yet to come after the installation process.

Even though it will be a small system: Scopia MCU 12, with 4 HD ports I will definitely share my overall experience regarding Radvision.

Cheers,
Ivo

[MCN]

Thanks Ivo
I look forward to the results of your installation. I suppose demo's look good, but like you, 'how does it actually work in my environment' is the real test.

You mention that the MCU has 4 HD ports - how many HD endpoints do you / will you have?

There was a posting on a web site from the RadVision CFO saying they were building a new MCU. Was this mentioned during your presentation?

I haven't had a lot of response to my question, so I am not sure there are many LifeSize / RadVision installations around.

The LifeSize endpoints look pretty good, and the price point is something that makes you want to look at them - or consider them anyway.
Anyway, thank you for responding.

MCN

[smcgee]

If you want to do a significant amount of HD calls you should check out the Codian (now Tandberg) MCU line. I think you will find the general consensus is they are the best in the HD space although more expensive than other choices. The LS endpoints along with a Codian MCU is a very popular setup. A good place to go is http://www.wainhouse.com and read their MCU whitepaper which compares the offerings.

[R Wallman]

Hi MCN,

You may have not received a lot of response on the discussUS.com site because the site is fairly new and not widely known. To let you know up front, I work for RADVISION. Please check out the information on the University of Houston deployment (attached). I can put you in contact with them (or others that have deployed SCOPIA). Just contact me through this site.

UHDcasestudy-2007.pdf

University of Houston RADVISION SCOPIA Deployment

(53.44 KiB) Downloaded 76 times

A few points on the SCOPIA platform:

The SCOPIA MCU was designed to provide HD capability at an affordable price. As you have seen, endpoint prices continue to trend down leading to HD systems at SD prices - the MCU price per port was also on this trend until HD. RADVISION didn't want to charge 3x or 4x the price of an SD port for an HD port and also wanted to maintain high frame rates when the system was loaded up with users.

There are fundamentally 2 methods of supporting processed HD on an MCU - one is very expensive that utilizes process intensive DSPs dedicated to HD processing. The other is affordable and shares DSP resources. There are significant differences in the methods of employing shared DSP resources that result in dramatically different pricing and performance.

The SCOPIA MCU provides a hybrid scheme dedicating DSP resources per HD conference and sharing those resources in conference. This allocates resources to encode high quality HD with each endpoint receiving the shared high quality stream from the MCU. RADVISION is the only company with shared encoding technology. The result is a very high quality solution at a reasonable price.

To risk sounding like a data sheet, other features of SCOPIA to consider are its integrated HD Desktop capabilites with H.239 and firewall traversal and SCOPIA's extensive UC integration with all the market leaders.