Meetings and Collaboration in the Blink of an Eye with Webex

One of the major things that separates Webex meetings and collaboration experiences from the rest of the pack, is our Webex-owned and operated data centers all over the world. These data centers are purpose-built and optimized for video, ensuring that we can give you the best meetings and collaboration experience on the planet. I’m really excited to announce that we’ve added a new, full-service Webex data center in Sydney, Australia.

Demand for Webex in Australia has increased, so it was a natural prioritization for us to expand our current footprint and build a dedicated data center here, to offer the entire suite of Webex offerings in-continent. One of the top concerns we hear about are video and audio quality, which could degrade your meetings experience. We wanted to make sure that as a continent-sized country, Australia gets the same great experience for any user within the continent – whether it’s audio, video or screen sharing. That’s why we’ve doubled down on support for the region and invested over $20 million for this new data center. If you live and work in Melbourne or Sydney, Australia, Auckland, New Zealand, or even Port Morseby, Papua New Guinea, connecting to this new data center will be faster and higher quality than ever before.

Ever heard of the phrase “in the blink of an eye?” A real blink of an eye takes 300 to 400 milliseconds and sometimes that can seem like an eternity when you need to get things done. What does that trivial fact have to do with meetings and collaboration? A whole lot. As video traffic over the internet continues to explode, hosting or joining an online meeting can become like a very slow and lazy blink. Instead of collaborating to get things done, you are slowly blinking, waiting for the meeting to actually start and maintain its quality. One of the largest contributors to a poor experience is latency and loss in path. As an example, current average latency to and from Australia is (conservatively) between 93 and 115 milliseconds one-way. With the new Webex data center in Sydney, meetings will be hosted inside Australia, decreasing latency numbers to about 12 to 30 milliseconds continent-wide. Now that’s a fast blink!

Our (not-so-secret) secret sauce is the Webex backbone, which has been built from the ground up to prioritize both voice and video real-time transport protocol (RTP) traffic globally, while still providing a highly secure network. We invest hundreds of millions of dollars in our backbone and all of it is optimized for audio and video traffic. Cisco owns the network and routes all meetings traffic on this managed network, optimized for media.

Additionally, one of our newest services – Webex Edge Connect – offers our customers direct connectivity to our data centers, bypassing their Internet links, increasing quality, and reducing bandwidth costs. This service will also be available on the go-live date of this new data center. You avoid the slow blink time and benefit from low loss, low jitter, and high-bandwidth connectivity between the local clients to the now in-country data center or the one closest to you. It’s a unique approach that only Cisco can take because of our deep networking and security heritage.

We are really excited to open up this new data center and expand the power of Webex to the land down-under.