Travels

Last week I’ve been on the road a lot. We’re doing performance tests for  Cisco TelePresence systems in different locations and I had to do them in Berlin and Fritzlar (yeah, I never really heard about that one before either).

My tour took me from home to Berlin, then 2 days later to Fritzlar and then back home, almost 2000 km in 4 days. It’ a alot but it was not that bad I guess. It’s my first time on the A9 section of the autobahn from Nürnberg to Berlin and I have to say driving was a pleasure (except for the non-stop rain, that is): 3 lanes, no traffic jams, no roadworks. And only “130 km/h recommended speed limit”, which basically means you can go as fast as you can but you better not cause any accidents or you are in trouble. If you survive, that is.

Which is more than I can say for the biker I saw  in an accident on the other side of the autobahn. First I saw a banged up car, then half of motorcycle, then the other half and then the biker. He was dead, covered by the police with something but you could clearly see that the shape of his body was slightly unnatural. I don’t know whos fault was it but why people drive at high-speed on a motorcycle while it rains heavily outside, it’s beyond me.

Anyway, I also got to drive on the A2 autobahn, the last major autobahn in Germany I have not been on. Same as A9: 3 lanes, no traffic jams, no road works, no speed limits. I think that when people talk about the no-speed limit on some of the autobahns, they assume everyone drives with 250km/h but that is not true. Yes, you do see people driving fast, which you can actually do since normally nobody stays on the high-speed left lane. But most of the cars don’t even if they could. I would say most drive at a cruising speed of around 150-170km/h.

Unlike Stuttgart with its 600.000 or so inhabitants, Berlin is big in comparison: 3.5 millions inhabitants and almost 5 millions in the metro area. I didn’t have time to see much, first day it rained continuously and the second day I only had a little bit of time in my lunch break. But it reminded me of Bucharest in a way, to be honest: long streets and avenues, high building density, many small shops and stores along the streets, etc. It’s a lot cleaner though, the buildings look better and the streets are really wide, not just the avenues.

Another notable thing is the one of Berlin’s airport, Tegel. It’s basically inside the city and since my hotel was really close to it, I could see the planes flying really low above the buildings while they were landing.  Took some time to get used to it. They don’t fly at night though (or I didn’t hear any) so I could sleep without problems.

Lots of streets with 30km/h speed limits, I most likely got flashed by a radar car I think on one of them. Like I said, I didn’t have time to see much of the city, only been to Alexanderplatz and walked a bit around that area but that is only a tiny part of the whole city. Maybe next time, whenever that may be.

Cisco Telepresence

Even though the video conferencing room was finished since quite some time ago, I only got to use it last week for the first time. This is a complete Cisco (of course) solution from the equipment all the way to the desks and lightning. It looks something like this:

The system itself is quite impressive, I have to admit.  The three 65″ plasma displays show a crystal-clear picture and there is no noticeable delay in video or sound. The version we have installed in this room is the somewhat expensive one, Telepresence CTS 3000, with three displays (each one which its own high definition camera) capable of providing smooth high-definition 720p or 1080p video. The system comes with 9 microphones and 3 speakers which allows it to provide directional sound, so you can actually hear the sound from the direction of the person currently speaking.

At the moment we have two such rooms in the two cities where the company’s main offices are and I imagine they save quite a lot in travel expenses. Of course, a system like this is far from cheap.  I don’t know exact prices but if I am not mistaken the complete system is around $300.000. Unlike other video conferencing vendors, Cisco decided to stick with quality which means the network requirements are much stricter. For example for the CTS 3000 version (the big system) the maximum bandwidth requirements are somewhere between 11 and 15Mbps. Bandwidth is not that cheap so you have to add that too.

The network has to be well designed as well. If you want everything to run smooth you need a low-latency, low-jitter (variation in latency) network where quality of service must be deployed end-to-end in order to ensure that.

Bottom line: you pay a lot but in the end I would say you get what you pay for.