AVT Question: Please share insights on the ongoing transition to networked AV and the role the cloud and AI play.
Thought Leader: Wylie Dunham, Senior Network Engineer and AVoIP Product Manager at Atlona
The continued growth of uncompressed AVoIP technologies such as SDVoE, along with many upcoming IPMX implementations, is placing greater emphasis on multi-gigabit network infrastructure. These technologies deliver high image quality, ultra-low latency, and predictable performance, making them ideal for demanding applications. However, many implementations also rely on 10GbE connectivity at the edge and higher-capacity network uplinks. For many organizations, the challenge is no longer the AV technology itself, but the cost and complexity of extending high-bandwidth network infrastructure to every endpoint.
As AVoIP continues to evolve, selecting the right transport technology should be driven by application requirements.
Wylie Dunham, Senior Network Engineer and AVoIP Product Manager at Atlona
At the same time, enterprise network investments are being driven by priorities well beyond AV. Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7 access points, cloud services, and increasing user density continue to shape infrastructure planning and budgeting. While MultiGig switching is becoming more common, it is typically deployed where those demands exist, with most access ports throughout the enterprise still operating at 1GbE. As a result, AV projects must increasingly align with existing IT strategies rather than expecting networks to be redesigned around video distribution. When these technologies are deployed, they are often isolated, not leveraging the AV everywhere feature of networked AV due to capacity requirements from the network edge through the core.
This raises an important question for the industry: Does every deployment require an uncompressed 10Gb stream? Answers depend entirely on the application. Mission-critical environments such as command and control, medical visualization, and live production may justify the investment in uncompressed transport. Meeting rooms, classrooms, digital signage, hospitality, and corporate communications often have different priorities, where scalability, infrastructure efficiency, and total cost of ownership can edge out the need for absolute minimum latency. As AVoIP continues to evolve, selecting the right transport technology should be driven by application requirements—not the assumption that every deployment demands the highest-available-bandwidth solution.
