Tata, AT&T Team Up For Telepresence

The buzz around telepresence tailed off last year, which was to be expected given the early stage of adoption it was actually at when the technology was the newest thing.  However today I noted the news from AT&T, which has forged interconnection agreements with both the Indian giant Tata Communications and Deutsche Telekom’s T-Systems division and thus increased the scope of its service.  

While Cisco’s stab at consumer telepresence was an airball, corporate demand for this sort of thing does seem to be graduating from the ‘gee whiz’ stage into actual usefulness.  The various large global carriers have been working on various interconnection initiatives for a few years now, and perhaps it is now time for the product to take its true place in the pantheon of bandwidth consumption.

But then again, does making teleconferences so fully immersive really bring tangible enough benefits to corporations to justify the various costs of the equipment and bandwidth needed?  It’s still a hard jump for me, but perhaps I’m just not that visual a person overall.  Given that just what bits of executive largess are a necessary part of smooth management and what bits aren’t is a nebulous thing, I guess I’ll grant that it’s a better use of money than the average corporate jet!

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Categories: telepresence