Why is it that every day, hundreds of thousands of business people strip down, pile all their belongings into gray plastic trays, trudge through airport security, climb on to absurdly cramped aircraft (with questionable maintenance as we read in the news this week), have their biological clocks confused, expose themselves to God only knows what kinds of infectious diseases and deep vein thrombosis (which American Airlines thoughtfully explains in the back of their inflight magazine), spend increasingly astonishing amounts of money to stay in the uninspiring surroundings of chain hotels, rent unfamiliar cars, turn around and do it all again, finally crawling into their own beds at some ungodly hour after three hour flight delays and missed connections when they could have walked a few feet down to the videoconference center and conducted their meeting electronically in about a tenth of the time and at virtually zero cost?
I've been around long enough to remember when air travel was a big deal. People dressed up for the occasion. The airlines actually tried to serve decent food. It was a bit exotic, romantic, an adventure.
Today, between the airlines' conviction that unless the passengers suffer broken legs they haven't found the limit of the number of passengers they can cram into a plane, the TSA who strips us down and x-rays everything we own to convince us that flying is actually safe (in spite of failing to catch 75% of the government's tests simulating smuggling contraband onto airplanes) bad or no food at all, air travel is about as appealing as riding Greyhound. And at Greyhound you don't have to deal with the TSA.
I took my stepdaughter and granddaughter and wife to New York last fall to visit my oldest daughter Jenessa and her new baby. I've been going to New York since I was a child. The hotels that I normally stayed were now at least $450 a night. The Marriott Marquise on Times Square where I've stayed many times...$750. We're talking Marriott here, not the Four Seasons. I was astonished.
I have literally millions of air miles under my belt. It is generally a misery.
Not very many years ago, videoconferencing was very exotic technology. Then, it became more affordable, but still required ISDN lines to work properly. An ISDN line is basically two POTS (plain old telephone service) lines multiplexed together. To get 30 frame per second, full motion video, you need three ISDNs (384K of bandwidth). They are relatively expensive, tend to be fussy to get installed right and maintain, and when you are using them, you are making the equivalent of six concurrent long distance phone calls.
You couldn't use internet protocol (IP) because the IP isn't a real time process. Half your data packets could be getting routed through Oshkosh and the other half through Stockholm. When they all train up and run down to your email box, the difference in timing doesn't matter. For video and audio, the latency or timing is critical. A few years ago, however, the internet backbone adopted QOS (quality of service), a technology that flags and prioritizes traffic. Video gets top priority, voice second and data third. This has made IP videoconferencing viable. Now, you have only the cost of your broadband service (which you are paying for anyway) and the cost of the equipment.
Cisco Systems is using the term telepresence now to describe the systems they are selling (http://cisco.com/en/US/products/ps7060/index.html). Life size, high definition is pretty amazing, but still relatively expensive. However, high def is increasingly coming into the cost range that almost any business can afford. Take a look at www.lifesize.com. The Cisco setups cost about $375,000 per station and need a T-3 circuit to handle the bandwidth. A bit out of reach for most. Polycom is the market leader in videoconferencing (www.polycom.com) and you can put in a station for about $6,000, and much less if you want to use your computer monitor.
By the way, when I talk about videoconferencing, I'm not talking about a Logictec web cam clamped onto your monitor and a two inch square jerky picture on your screen. A good video conference setup allows you to control the camera at both ends. You should be able to pan and zoom, preset shots if you are covering a large meeting room at the other end, and set the camera to follow voices if you want.
I can tell you this. I put videoconferencing in six or seven years ago and spent six hours in my first video meeting with a client in California. When the meeting was over, I sat there stunned realizing that I didn't have to dash to the airport, turn in the rental car, wait for an hour plus (assuming the flight was on time) suffer the indignities of security and get home at one in the morning. I walked over to my desk and got almost an additional full day's work done.
So why isn't everyone doing this? An excellent question the answer to which eludes me. It won't work for every type of business meeting. It's not the same as being there. It's about 85% though and I believe it would eliminate about 75% of business travel. Let's face it, air travel is bad for the environment, it's hard on the people, it's incredibly expensive especially when you factor in the lost productivity and physical wear and tear.
I remember when fax machines were exotic. When I was meeting with a client in Manhattan and they suggested we fax our lunch order down to the deli around the corner, I knew the fax revolution had arrived. Once it hit critical mass, it just exploded. Everybody had one. Sooner or later the same has got to happen with video. The economics are there.
If I ran a company with an outside sales force with national accounts, I would offer to give my clients a videoconferencing setup if they would use it to meet with my reps (and whoever else they wanted to talk to). It would pay for itself in a few months.
There is every reason to make videoconferencing as ubiquitous as fax, email or telephone. It is technology whose time has come. Make your people happy. Keep them at home where they can eat home-cooked meals, drive their own cars, sleep in the own beds with their partners, and get more work done with less effort and sleep deprivation. Bite the bullet. Put a system in and experiment with it. If you have two locations, it's a no-brainer. If you don't, talk to a customer you travel to regularly and see if they would be willing to run the experiment with you. When enough people realize the benefits, we'll get to critical mass.
Then, mercifully, our trips to the airport will be fewer and farther between. By the way, my video address is 63.253.185.66. Give me a call.
