What You Need to Know About Connecting AV to the Network

Many times you’re going to see the AV contractor or consultant get on the phone with the IT director and the knowledge expert from the actual manufacturer to go through those things like logging. Do you want logging enabled so you know when someone accesses the box and when they didn’t?

Then you want to have some sort of resiliency model. What’s the process if that box crashes? What happens if it sends out alerts? A lot of boxes are set up to respond by email so they’re configured somehow into the email services. If they’re not correctly coordinated, they could send out an email every second for every device that isn’t connected and that can cause a lot of problems.

Then there’s the firmware upgrade process. I just was at a company site. They had a series of the latest and greatest touch-controlled technology out there by one of the largest software manufacturing companies that you can imagine. They all are set to receive their updates automatically over the internet.

Most companies should avoid that or do avoid that because you never know when that box is going to be upgraded. You could end up with something happening overnight with a change that would affect everybody in the morning time. Many of these devices are actually moving that way where their upgrades are so agile they’re going to happen at any time of the day, which means they have to be connected to the internet to do that. That’s a big risk as well.

TL: Many IT directors have concerns about how equipment connected to the network will affect network performance, specifically. In that respect, what are some things that they need to discuss with their AV consultant or AV integrator to make sure they have that confidence that their network performance won’t be hindered?

MP: Well, a lot of the LANs and the MANs, the metro area networks and the LAN networks are typically outfitted with enough capacity that I really think that it’s going to be a hit for performance is if there’s going to be high-bandwidth streaming or a ton of streaming.

The WAN’s different. The WAN is typically where you’re getting into subscribing for services with a third party and you’re looking at capacity demands and peak utilizations so you pay for what you use. They’re trying to keep that as inexpensive as possible. Typically you’re going to see that problem more on the WAN side than the LAN, at least in my experience with the enterprise.

There are questions you need to ask but I think the way to do this first is, let’s flip this and ask it the other way around, which is how does the IT network impact what you’re trying to do with the AV, right? In other words, if you’re talking about performance, how is that network set up?

We’re looking at solutions that are based upon quality service because you really have a network of prioritization and you need to identify what are the layers of prioritization and where does the device that you’re putting on the network fit in that priority? Is it best effort? Is it scavenger class or is it a priority above that?

That starts to really help because now the differentiators are, okay, I’ve got to have voice services at a priority above everything else. If I’m a transactional company, I have to have those transactions occurring a lot higher up. Then you have an open area, which basically is best effort for a bunch of stuff. Then you’ve got things that, well, if it gets there the latency is not such a big deal because I’m just looking for a response back. I don’t have to have the level of dual traffic.

For example, video conferencing. If you put that into best effort you may see issues where you’re getting some packet loss and some recovery. There are some challenges about performance when you’re in there. It’s really about the competition with the other devices that have been networked and looking at contention.

I think the other thing that happens if you start to use the full gigabit of bandwidth for video, you’ve got to figure out how the network’s going to handle that. That’s really where we’re at with video conferencing and streaming. The old way used to be to separate the networks out. That’s not what’s happening. Now we’re looking at quality of service.

I think what we would typically see is that you’ve got to packet sniff to make sure that the specs that are being provided by the vendor are actually being created when you put them into utilization. I think that’s also the utilization capacity model. I think that the biggest challenge I had working in the enterprise estimation area, which is how much of an impact this is going to be. What is my concurrent utilization? How many simultaneous concurrent activities are happening at a given time?

There aren’t really good analytic tools to be able to do that. CISCO was supposed to be able to do that with some of their video conferencing but it takes a lot of processing power to be able to figure that out. Tools like TMS don’t do that well. You end up having to crunch the numbers on spreadsheets anyways and make a good guess out of it.

TL: Should IT directors require a systems integrator or consultant to do a network survey or a needs assessment? If so, what should they hope the consultant or integrator provides as a result?

MP: I think, in some ways, that’s sort of a Catch-22 as a question because there are very few AV integrators that really have the savvy to do a network survey.

I think what would be helpful is, really, what the network people are looking is to get a general idea of what the network topology is and the type of hardware that’s being used. I think that’s important because what we’d want to do in our design is make sure that we’re staging and recreating the scenarios as closely matching the actual network design that’s going to be implemented.

For the kind of AV that’s coming out that’s so new, the networks aren’t set up right now to do what’s necessary. If you look at the Crestron solution, the new products they’re coming out with, they’re trying to cram 4K 4:4:4 into 900 megabits. You can start doing that with a couple of rooms and you start to fill out the switch fabric. It’s not so much the switches themselves but it’s the links between the switches.

The switch isn’t really going to be the problem. It’s connecting to the next switch. Now you’re increasing that switch from one gig to a 10-gig. Seriously, you’re looking at that possibly being a 40 or a 100-gig network right at the switch.

If you look at the cost of that, the gig SAP connectors are about $200 for one gig. They come up to about $350 for 10-gig. When you get to a 40-gig connector, they’re about $1,000 each, times that two per cable, two cables per switch. That starts if you want redundancy.

The thing that gets thrown down is fiber, right, which is like, “Okay, we’ll just put fiber area everywhere.” The reality is that design starts to put point-to-point limitations. You’re only going to be able to have your services exactly where you predicted them previously. That goes right in the face of the mobility and the agility that these officers are trying to create.

The conversation has to come back to, okay, if you’re going to do this kind of increased bandwidth and bandwidth requirements for AV, what is the redundancy model? How are you going to provide some sense of resiliency because that’s key to any IT infrastructure. If I create it here I’ve got to have a backup plan to be able to switch over. Now you have to get a little bit more practical.

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