184. Scientist’s gadgets: Polycom

Dear readers,

yesterday you did not have the pleasure to read (or were not disappointed by ) a new post at NEQNET, but I do have a good excuse – first time in my life I have delivered a 1 hour teleconference seminar overseas. I did need some time to prepare the presentation as well as to deal with technical problems related to the telecon connection. Apart from sharing my impressions, I consider this post as
notes for myself, so that I can easily reproduce the process of telecon connecting in the future.

The teleconference was between the Helsinki Institute of Physics (with only me on this side – since it was already quite late in Helsinki at the time of the presentation) and Los Alamos National Laboratory (it was very early there, so I had only about 10 or so listeners). The subject of my talk will not be disclosed at that time , but I do want to share with you my technical experience related to the telecon technology (in a few minutes, you’ll also partially understand why it is actually so cool to be a scientist, if you haven’t understood it already ).

In overall, I did not really expect that the teleconference technology is at so advanced stage now. We had a really long distance real time conversation with video, graphics etc. etc. without any dropped packages or noticeable delays in sound and video.

1. The device

The device used on my side is Polycom VSX 6000, the device on the LANL side was Polycom 8000 (I hope that I don’t disclose any secret information now, so NEQNET will not be shut down due to a DOE complaint )

The device really is a computer with hardware enabled graphics (H.264 codec) and sound (mp3, I guess) compression as well as noise cancellation technology. It has microphones, dynamics and a really strong digital cam built in – the latter supports autofocus and seems to be able to automatically find your face if you move around the office The Polycom device has an Ethernet and ISDN dial up support, but the latter is considered obsolete in Finland – our connection was over IP dial up.

2. Firewalls. How to configure ports

You don’t really need another computer to initiate the conversation – all software and hardware you need are built in into the Polycom device. This however makes things a bit complicated to hack if something goes wrong with the connection. One issue we had is that both LANL (of course!) and the University of Helsinki are behind firewall, so at first we were unable to connect to each other.

In the end, it turned out that Polycom devices use rather large number of ports to establish and keep the connection. If you want everything to go smoothly, you have to open the following ports:

• Port 389 (TCP): For ILS registration
• Port 1503 (TCP): Microsoft NetMeeting T.120 data sharing
• Port 1718 (UDP): Gatekeeper discovery
• Port 1719 (UDP): Gatekeeper RAS (Must be bi-directional)
• Port 1720 (TCP) H.323 Call setup (Must be bi-directional)
• Port 1731 (TCP): Audio call control (Must be bi-directional)
• Ports 3230-3235 (TCP/UDP): Signaling and control for audio, call, video and data/FECC
• Port 3603 (TCP): ViaVideo Web interface (ViaVideo users only)

(Dear hackers, please don’t bother, the ports were only open for the time of conversation.) In the end, opening those ports somehow was not enough, so we had to stream the presentation through a gate (some standard Polycom gate in Europe, as far as I remember).

3. An overall impression. Why do you really need to have a Polycom in your lab/institute.

Everything went extremely smoothly. I’ve connected my Tablet PC (probably the subject of another “Scientist’s gadgets” post) to the Polycom device and was able to write directly on screen; people at LANL were getting this handwriting in real time, as well as my accompanying voice narration A real time conversation overseas did not seem to slow the video anyhow.

If by a chance you don’t have this kind of device in your institution, a good argument exists for your boss to acquire it (he’ll do that from the grant money, anyway): although the device is rather expensive by itself, it will save the boss lots of money in the long run – since instead of inviting the person to give a talk one can really ask her/him to give a virtual teleconference seminar, the associated cost of which is zero Also, telecon devices do help incredibly to build up collaborations, as their extensive use by our experimetalists team at HIP shows (they talk with CERN and Fermilab every single day).

If your boss proves to be too greedy, I’ll show you how to run teleconferences and teleconference presentations for free in one of the future “Scientist’s gadgets” posts.

4. Thanks

I would like to thank Prof. Orava for allowing me to use his Polycom device, J. Aaltonen for the help with establishing connection and Jeremy Chacon on the LANL side.