Jack, >I have a customer ( a hotel) who is looking to offer video conferencing >capabilities to their customers. I think your problem is more interesting than your question you propose to solve it. I need to make these assumptions based on the information you provided: I am assuming that you are using a Video over IP solution with a frame DS3 to an ISP providing Internet connectivity to a switched 100Mb Lan in the Hotel. Also, that your primarily concerned with the quality of video conference, and not something else that I may have missed. Because your conference bandwidth is so high, I almost assumed that it was a point-point FR to the other conferencing location, but that would not make sence for the product you described in a Hotel. You can build a great network inside the hotel with guarantied DVD quality conferencing between the rooms but once you go out past your router your datagrams are like minnows trying to swim out to sea. In other words a lot of them won't make it, or at least not on time. This is true for as long as you depend on the internet as we know and love it today to support your conferencing. Your case is complicated by the fact that you are using FR to get to the internet. Since using the internet is the only way to offer this sort of service, you have to live with it or without the video product. My recommendation for the best possible experience is to use a Video software, like VCON, that allows you to set the diff serve, or TOS bit on out going video packets. Then configure WRED, and CBWFQ so your video traffic doesn't get hit by the guy in room 311 surfing porn. This will get your video out onto the frame relay cloud and with CAR you should be able to control the traffic you place onto your circuit so you never exceed your CIR. If the you really want to limit the port out of the conference room use CAR as long as your switch supports it. I believe Cisco works might support this, but I don't have any experience with it to advise wither it would be a good idea to put this in the hands of the front desk. If the Hotel wants to creatively bill their customers based on usage you should be able to find a way to make that work with SNMP traps and monitoring software on the conference room ports though I don't envision it being something the receptionist would do without development. Though even if you build all this your conferencing will be limited to low bandwidths. At most you might get 500Kb/s on a good day, but usually you would have to settle for much less. No matter what bandwidth is used for the conference the experience will be Unpredictable and often unacceptable. We are getting used to viewing some pretty decent video streams on our PCs at work, but we have to remember that those files are hosted at the middle of the Internet or closer these days. Video conferencing has to take the long haul through the core and past the edge of another part of the internet. Because of this the 5MB and 10MB conferencing figures are not realistic. Based on my experience, a 1 Mb conference is actually quite a good experience, but the Internet will not even support that consistently. --David _________________________________ FAQ, list archives, and subscription info: http://www.groupstudy.com/list/cisco.html Report misconduct and Nondisclosure violations to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
