Tata Communications provides Cisco TelePresence at Taj Mumbai, Bangalore

16 October 2008

Tata Communications has announced the launch of its Telepresence rooms - multi-location conference systems that include high-quality video and audio as well as presentation facilities, using telepresence equipment made by Cisco, allowing real-time, face-to-face communications over a converged IP network.

The service wil be available for public use in the US and UK and will be linked to additional public rooms in Mumbai, Bangalore and Chennai.

Earlier in April, Tata Communications had announced that it would set up telepresence rooms at CII offices in four cities - New Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad - and available for CII members on a 'pay-per-use' basis (See: Tata Communications and Cisco to set up telepresence rooms at CII).

The service will allow companies and individual users to utilise these Telepresence centres for one-off meetings to help them save on travel time and costs by allowing multi-location conferenceing. Each Telepresence centre can accommodate up to 18 people in a single room that is equipped with state-of-the-art video conferencing technology, and will be available for rent from $299 to $899 an hour, depending on the room size.

The move follows a similar initiative in the US by Hewlett Packard in March this year, in partnership with Marriott International to make HP's video-conferencing technology, known as Halo, available to the public at selected Marriott hotels.

Tata Communications is working with Cisco, Taj Hotels, the Indian Hotels Company Limited, and the Confederation of India Industry (CII) to offer public telepresence facilities, available on hourly rent.