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Through community discussions, it has become clear that some NRENs other than SWITCH would also be interested in taking off-the-shelf, hosted video conferencing services of Vidyo or other vendors' software. Therefore, GÉANT started to investigate whether or not the model that works for SWITCH could be extended to other NRENs. Part of this investigation was to issue a mini survey and analyses the NREN responses who were keen on giving us feedback. 

Survey introduction

The following introduction was given to the survey.:

The GÉANT project’s WebRTC Task – in conjunction with the open GÉANT Task Force on Web-RTC (TF-WebRTC) – ended up with a set of recommendations for the European research and education community, reported in the Deliverable 12.3 “WebRTC Requirements and R&E Deployment Roadmap”. One of the recommendations is as follows:


“Make the adoption of useful WebRTC services easier by adding them to the GÉANT Cloud Catalogue, with framework agreements where opportune. In particular, make one or more easy to use WebRTC desktop video conferencing services available to all European R&E users through the GÉANT clouds service catalogue, soonest.”

The GÉANT project’s new “Application and Service Delivery Development” team is going to actively look into video conferencing solutions – primarily those supporting the WebRTC protocol and native browser clients – either offered by the NREN community or by commercial partners, out of their own cloud infrastructure or hosted in third-party clouds.
 
The service

Following a request from the Swiss NREN (SWITCH) to act as the intermediary/reseller for the same video conferencing service that CERN operates for its user community using the Vidyo product, GÉANT have been working with CERN and Vidyo to construct an integrated service bundle for SWITCH where:
  • Vidyo provides the video conferencing technology and software.
  • CERN provides hosting in their highly reliable cloud infrastructure.
  • GÉANT manages end-user licenses, accounts, billing and provides second line support. 

The main characteristics of this service (as described by Vidyo) are set out below:
  • Can scale to multiple thousand concurrent users.
  • Up to hundreds of participant in one meeting.
  • Licenses are needed for the maximum number of concurrent users and not all the individual users.
  • Multi device support: iOS, Android, Windows, MacOS, Linux, room systems.
  • Multi protocols and systems support: WebRTC, H.264svc, SIP, H.323, Skype for Business.

The offering

Before deciding to make this specific service bundle more widely available to the NREN community via the GÉANT Cloud Catalogue, we need to understand the likely demand from NRENs to sign up for this particular deal.

Note that, although CERN offered to host the service in their cloud infrastructure, we are also looking into other models where NRENs or GÉANT can provide hosting for Vidyo.

We would appreciate your answers to the following 6 questions about NRENs interest to provide their users with a video conference service, especially this particular Vidyo/CERN/GÉANT deal.

Survey outcome

The survey was announced on the week before the TF-WebRTC task force meeting on 3 May 2016, in Berlin, Germany. There were 11 NREN answers received by the TF-WebRTC meeting and other 3 NRENs answered right after we meeting. 10 responses were received from the active TF-WebRTC community participants and 4 from those NRENs that are not represented in TF-WebRTC.

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