Experiences with High Definition

We review the design and implementation of UltraGrid, a new high definition video conferencing system, and present some experimental results. UltraGrid was the first system to support gigabit rate high definition interactive video conferencing on commodity systems and networks, and we present measurements to illustrate behavior of production networks subject to such real time traffic. We illustrate the benefits of hybrid IP/provisioned optical networks over best effort IP networks for this class of traffic, and motivate the development of congestion control algorithms for interactive conferencing on best effort IP networks.