Telecom Ramblings

There is little argument that telepresence is one of the most exciting new technologies coming online.  But one of the biggest raps has been that if each solution is proprietary, only people using the same provider.  This week we took another step toward turning telepresence from a sideshow into a real tool. British Telecom (BT: chart, news), Tata Communications (TCL: chart, news), AT&T (T: chart, news), and Cisco Systems (CSCO: chart, news) demonstrated a four-way conference between different networks:

Of course, this doesn’t fully solve the problem, it just means that if everyone uses Cisco gear they can all talk to each other.  That’s great, so long as you love a monopoly.  For a healthy telepresence marketplace, what we will need eventually is some way for different telepresence gear to talk to each other.  In the end, it needs to be like a phone call.