Cisco gears up for video

NETWORK GEAR maker Cisco said that networks will soon be clogged with video data and it is making its products better-suited for handling that traffic.

David Hsieh, vice president of marketing for Cisco's Emerging Technologies group said that video is rapidly becoming the dominant traffic on networks.

Cisco believes that the way to adapt involves designing its hardware to handle medianets such that service provider, enterprise and home networks are optimised for video and rich media.

It has built new capabilities into its recently announced ASR9000 edge router to improve home video traveling over carrier networks.

Cisco has also released the Media Experience Engine 3000, which can take video content created for one platform and convert it for viewing on others. For example, a meeting held over Cisco's Telepresence videoconferencing system, in high-definition video on large plasma screens, could be recorded and adapted automatically for playback on an employee's PC.

Suraj Shetty, Cisco's vice president of worldwide service provider marketing, said that traditional IP networks are designed to transport discrete packets. But with video it is more important to stream data continuously, he said.

While early performance-enhancing networking technologies have helped support video as one of many applications, it is important to think about video as the main application, he said.

Analysts Yankee Group claim that Cisco is the only company that is thinking this way and think it will take the company into areas where standards don't exist or have to be adapted. µ

L'Inq
Computerworld