Following the announcement that Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire-based Data & Control Equipment is marketing PictureTel’s V-3100 video conferencing system in the UK (CI No 1,231), the company has carried out its first installations. The system is now being used in the UK by the consultants Bain & Co, as well as by companies such as Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs. The system, which uses two British Telecom 64Kbps IDA dial-up lines will also operate on British Telecom’s 1420 service to be announced in 1990. At the moment IDA is available on more than 170 British Telecom exchanges in the UK, with the V-3100 having the option of being linked to between 30 and 40 exchanges in the US (courtesy of AT&T), Japan (courtesy of Kyocera) and France (thanks to France Telecom). The V-3100 offers a rate conversion system between the US 56Kbps network and the UK 64Kbps network, while the system delay when communicating between the US and the UK is an impressive 450mS less than satellite delay. Meanwhile in Peabody, Massachusetts, PictureTel is working towards a multi-vendor situation prior to the announcement of the Px64 standard. The first of these standards is scheduled for adoption in July 1990, and PictureTel says it will deliver its Link 64 product offering a resolution of 256 by 240 within 30 days of the standard announcement. It will also launch a Link 64E product giving a full 352 by 288 resolution and a Link 2.0 product to extend the performance and capabilities of the Codec coder-decoder, enabling it to take up to 2M-bits in bandwidth. In the US users of the V-3100 system range from the aerospace industry, through stockbrokers, banks and insurance companies to pharmaceutical companies. The system even played a part in helping to combat the Exxgn!Valdez oil spillage in Alaska, by linking the Alaskan salvage operation with Houston. The applications for such an inexpensive way of communicating both live visuals and sound are many. For example, it is hoped that the V-3100 will be a standard installation in hotels. All in all, PictureTel’s Codec looks like giving its rivals British Telecom and Maxwell Communications a good run for their money.
