I’m really excited by this new Cisco and Librestream MMVC solution. Lots of information out on the web, and lots of questions so I thought I’d put a brief video together to give you an introduction and to see if we can get a discussion going and also to see if we can answer some of the questions for you. The video starts talking about what really matters. What are the pain-points that manufacturers and industry have today? How do they get hold of the right people to fix things if something goes wrong, and how can they say ‘I see what you mean now’ -- and really mean it?
All this matters because keeping things running matters. Being able to communicate effectively in real time using video, speech and pictures -- globally, if need be -- matters. Knowing what’s going on and having clearer visibility matters. Working out what to do next, whether it’s developing a new product or fixing an operational problem fast, matters a lot.
So much happened on Tuesday at Cisco Partner Summit: musical performances, artist Frency painting in the moment on stage, as well as keynotes from SVP Keith Goodwin, Cisco CEO John Chambers, SVP Edison Peres, and the new Cisco COO Gary Moore. We also heard big announcements around cloud and collaborative professional services.
We had some other exciting things happening on Tuesday, so watch our short Partner Update newscast for the day’s highlights.
Did you miss any of the sessions from Tuesday? Don’t worry, you can still watch them… Read More »
The Midwestern United States is an interesting place to live. My father calls it “the farm belt.” Families tend to grow a bit larger, and people tend to linger closer to home as they grow up. But even the close-knit Midwest family structure can’t completely close the miles that creep between family members as school, career, and retirement priorities take over.
In my case, a family that was so close for so many years suddenly grew very distant when my mom and dad moved to Florida at age 65. My own family also blossomed in that timeframe, growing to four beautiful children, all under age six. While we travelled twice to visit when our family numbered two children, it quickly became cost prohibitive to visit Oma and Opa as the family grew to four (our German heritage shows through by the names we call our grandparents).
The only way to be sure of delivering highest quality of experience is by actually measuring QoE of real traffic. In IOS 15.1.3T, we introduced a new embedded monitoring capability to collect packet loss, jitter, delay and response time information for performance evaluation of data, voice and video services. The feature is called IOS Performance Monitor. (See yesterday’s blog on User Traffic Analysis by Medianet performance Monitor.)
In December of last year, Cisco IT was running a medianet pilot program for the new IOS performance monitor feature as their ongoing effort to provide high quality and improved services to end users. The pilot was designed to support 50 remote sites equipped with the ISR-891 routers. Two of the pilot sites were small Cisco offices and the remaining was home offices. I was lucky enough to be selected for the pilot.
Network operators are tasked with providing a foundation network that can deliver a variety of applications to their users at any time. For the most part, the network is in the background, humming away while users enjoy the applications. However; once in a while, the application will slow down, or hiccup, and the first suspect is usually the network.
Figure 1 - Poor video quality caused by packet loss.
Sometimes this is not without just cause; the network may be composed of various administrative domains in various states of work, and many things that are outside the domain of control of any network operator (bad fiber, rain clouds, bulldozers, floods etc.). There is the common experience of the ping test passing, but still something wrong within the network. Or the other case, where the ping fails intermittently, but there is no clue about the location of the problem.
