Case study
January 2011
In 2007, Bell made a bold decision to explore wide-spread internal deployment of new video conferencing technology. Its goals were to cut travel costs, increase productivity, improve how their teams communicate internally–and develop best practices for engineering a large-scale video network.
Today, VideoZone is the largest internal deployment of video units in Canada, and is regarded by average employees and top executives alike as an unqualified success. It is nothing less than a fundamental culture shift in how Bell holds meetings and communicates internally: every day, employees make hundreds and hundreds of video calls, and the overall volume of calls continues to grow by some 50% year-over-year. As a result of the travel reduction VideoZone has provided substantial operational savings with rapid returns on investment–a conference room unit provides ROI within three to six months, and a desktop unit will pay for itself if it replaces just two day trips.
"It's really taken off," says Stanley Wu, the senior analyst of information technology at Bell who has led the program from its inception. "Employees appreciate not having to travel, while still being able to have highly productive face-to-face meetings."
Lessons learned
Through preparing for the rollout, Bell learned first-hand about how to overcome the unique technical challenges of deploying multiple kinds of video solutions, including immersive telepresence suites, multipurpose video conferencing rooms, and desktop video calling units.
Led by a six-member steering committee of experts from Bell's Network, Security, Technology Development and IT departments, the program identified and resolved three critical technical issues:
- How to connect video end-points to its IP network, and ensure a high quality of service
- How to manage bandwidth
- How to secure the video network
This resource outlines the individual technology challenges posed by the deployment of a video network, and how Bell addressed each.
1. Connecting video to the network
Although video solutions can be deployed with (and in fact once required) a separate network infrastructure, Bell identified early on that VideoZone should connect using Bell's existing IP-VPN service with IP-based video data layered on top of voice services and other applications. This was both the most economical option, because it did not require capital investment in new network infrastructure, but also the simplest to roll out, scale and eventually integrate into collaboration solutions.
Through testing and extensive research over the course of several months, including tests of all components from potential solution vendors, the Technology Development team developed the infrastructure architecture and topology. Early in the process, the team identified two key design principals.
1.1 Design principals
First, it wanted centralized management. Managing the entire video environment from one central point was important because as it became necessary to update end-point devices' firmware for new features or to fix bugs, anything less than a centralized batch process would be too resource-intensive. That decision proved prescient, as well: although VideoZone has grown to more than 700 endpoints, each can be upgraded in a straightforward, automated manner via the network. (The centralized management also enabled a single calling directory for all of VideoZone.)
Second, the team adopted standards-based technology. Although several proprietary solutions offered impressive features, Bell wanted to avoid a "walled garden" video network that could limit future expansion or interoperability with other technologies.
1.2 Making the connection
One critical challenge was determining what video networking protocols the various video units–telepresence, conference, desktop–would use to connect. The team selected two predominant protocols with one foot firmly in the present but also an eye to the near-future: H.323 and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). Both had advantages:
- H.323, as the established but somewhat legacy protocol, is stable and dependable
- SIP has a broader set of features that will gradually overtake H.323, but is a newer technology that is still maturing
The Technology Development team decided all end-points needed to support both protocol stacks, so units could slowly migrate from H.323 to SIP. In order to get the two protocols interworking, Bell implemented a Video Communication Server (VCS) to make the connection. The result is a flexible video environment that is transparent to users– they are not restricted due to technology.
Similarly, the group tested how to enable calls outside the Bell IP-VPN WAN, either to external IP networks, or to video solutions operating on legacy ISDN network technology. Both scenarios required gateways that could manage a secure firewall traversal
2. Managing bandwidth
The primary concern of the Network group was limiting the effect that video would have on the IP-VPN, WAN and LAN. Video can be a bandwidth-intensive application, with end- points that could consume 2 Megabits-per-second, 4 Mbps or even as much as 16 Mbps to deliver full high-definition quality. Given the critical services already running on the network–voice telephony, Internet, data, servers and workstations–network experts had to ensure that VideoZone did not saturate the network.
At the same time, however, the success of VideoZone rested on delivering a high-quality experience for users. If bandwidth was not managed properly, video could suffer image pixelization or fuzzy picture resolution, jitter, lip-synch issues–or in the worst-case scenario, dropped calls.
2.1 Three bandwidth strategies
Bell faced several options in how it could manage bandwidth on its network:
- Overprovisioning bandwidth–supplying greater amounts of bandwidth across the network and to each end-point requires the costly roll-out of more network infrastructure that gets reserved for the video network. While it is a serviceable solution, it is imprecise and wasteful, as applications tend to expand the bandwidth they use to consume as much as is available.
- Quality of service (QoS) on an MPLS network–because the Bell IP-VPN is an MPLS network, it is capable of quality of service (QoS) prioritization, which allows administrators to capture IP headers for video traffic and designate portions of bandwidth for it. QoS prioritization proved to be an elegant solution. With extensive testing, Bell determined the optimum portion of the network that should be reserved for video. Other traffic, including Internet and voice, would use the balance; so long as VideoZone did not exceed its limit, the quality of video calls could be guaranteed, while all other traffic is protected in its managed piece of available capacity.
- Zoning and piping–not all environments in the LAN infrastructure could support QoS, so another approach was to manage bandwidth consumption in certain zones of the network at the application layer, so that video bandwidth did not imperil the corporate data lifeline. Through "zoning and piping", clusters of local area networks were identified based on office building or geographic region, and they were granted different rules based on the supply of bandwidth within those clusters.
By using a mix of all three bandwidth strategies, Bell was able to cost-effectively manage network requirements for VideoZone.
2.2 Determining optimal bandwidth threshold of end-points
A final approach Bell took was to carefully manage how much bandwidth each end-point used. Technology Development conducted testing to establish the optimal bandwidth threshold. For example, a telepresence unit could utilize as much as 16 Mbps for a real- time two-way video stream, and a video conference room unit could require as much as 4 Mbps. However, Bell's proprietary testing and technology proved that thresholds could be set much lower:
With new encoding technology built into the video codecs, high quality and HD video streams can be significantly compressed. As such, the benefits of using more bandwidth were marginal, and the dramatically lower usage thresholds ensured that the network would be able to handle substantial numbers of simultaneous video calls without any quality degradation.
3. Securing VideoZone
Like many large organizations, Bell places a very high priority on the security of its corporate network. Any communication that traverses that network must not compromise its integrity.
The VideoZone project required input from internal security experts at Bell to determine the best way control the video network.
Security included two aspects:
- Physical security of the end-points
- Network management and policing
One particular issue was how to securely manage access to teleworkers, clients and other video callers that were not directly connected to the LAN.
Bell determined that centrally controlling its network through a single central management solution was the most effective way to support and police its usage. Using a variety of techniques Bell was able to lower full time support staff to only 1.5 people. Even with that small a support group, any issues are resolved within minutes and full monitoring is enabled.
Any video connection made to an external endpoint (that is, not managed as part of VideoZone), meant exposing Bell's network to security risks from the public Internet. With the proper implementation of an Internet Gateway, this "firewall traversal" can be done securely, limiting exposure to one piece of infrastructure that is shielded from the rest of the internal network. Each video call is also encrypted using military-grade Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) to prevent eavesdropping.
A crucial step–but only the first
The rapid growth of video conferencing and video calling at Bell has changed how the organization operates. Employees at all levels now need to travel less, and they are able to hold highly productive face-to-face meetings more frequently. "The success of VideoZone isn't only due to technology," Wu acknowledges. "Achieving a high rate of adoption has required an extensive program of awareness campaigns, campus demos, training, and vocal support from senior leaders. But getting the technology right was the critical first step. Every aspect of the experience had to be top-notch, or no one would use video regularly."
Watch VideoZone in action
Want to get see how VideoZone works? Check out this video of top executives from Bell discussing how the video network was deployed and how this communication tool has changed their daily work.
Talk to Bell
If you would like to learn more about how Bell can help your organization deploy the right video solution for you, contact us to have a conversation. You can also read a case study on the change lessons learned from Bell's deployment.