Both AV (audiovisual) and IT (information technology) professionals are integral to business operations. There’s no denying this. While there’s sure to be some overlap between AV and IT teams, their job functions are very different. And for that reason, they shouldn’t be treated as the same thing.

Take, for example, a company seeking ways to drive value, spark creativity, and better connect with its customers. Audio and video upgrades may be the answer. However, if you find yourself contemplating these upgrades, you can’t do anything until you answer the million-dollar question: Who will manage the project?

[5 Takeaways from the AV/IT Summit 2022]

It’s natural to start your search internally. This typically leads you to the IT department. Keeping the project in-house is the easy solution, but is it best? Not always. Remember, AV and IT are not interchangeable. Yes, they’re both technologically minded, but the two functions approach opportunities and issues very differently from a philosophical standpoint. Let’s take a closer look at the differences between AV and IT teams.

Proactive vs. Reactive

While traditional models of technology support (IT) are primarily focused on instant (or timely) remediation and response to objectively measured challenges—such as internal ticketing systems and procedural services—AV support looks very different. AV teams, while maintaining an objective aspect of their service model, must equally offer support and attentiveness to subjective variables of its critical implementations.

In simple terms, AV teams are proactive while IT teams are more focused on providing instantaneous solutions to real-time problems. AV professionals strive to remain one step ahead of the game. They’re interested in what they can do today to improve tomorrow. Conversely, IT teams have a greater focus on user support.

The AV mindset isn’t better than the IT mindset or vice versa. They’re simply different. Think about it like this: AV cares about how clear it sounds, how sharp it looks, how simple it is to operate, and how clean it is connected. IT professionals are more focused on installation, maintenance, and repair. It’s where the mentality of technical correction collides with the optics of preference, professionalism, and attentiveness.

[Return of the Huddle Room]

Some AV professionals have skills that would suit them well in the IT field, while some IT professionals have skills that would translate to the AV field. This is a good thing. It helps both groups understand the responsibilities, wants, and needs of the other.

Whereas an AV team knows how to install world-class audio and video systems, IT is better suited to manage projects such as installing and managing computer, network, and communication systems. That doesn’t mean these tasks are independent of one another. There’s always a certain level of complementary skill crossover that makes for a stronger relationship.

AV Expert Benefits

Do you need a dedicated AV team or expert? Maybe you do, maybe you don’t—but the one thing that always holds true is that there are distinct benefits of having a dedicated AV expert in-house or via a partnership. These include:

Focused technical expertise. IT professionals don’t always understand the impact a well-designed AV system can have on a company. It allows sales professionals to better connect with prospects, both in-person and during remote presentations. It also allows managers to better communicate with off-site employees, and makes for a more efficient in-office experience. Only an experienced, knowledgeable AV expert can make the decisions necessary for the desired end result.

Forward-thinking. IT professionals think about the here and now. Something goes wrong and they fix it. If there’s a need for an upgrade, they make it. In contrast, AV experts are forward-thinking. Every move they make is based on the here and now, as well as the impact it’ll have on the future of the company’s performance and financial circumstances.

In a perfect world, AV and IT professionals work hand in hand on both current problems and future solutions. This ensures that the right people have their hands on the right parts of every challenge or project.

Subjectively inclined and intentional. AV experts move with a purpose. There’s a reason for everything they do. They don’t make decisions just to get the job done. They make intentional decisions meant to have a positive effect on the company as a whole.

This is not a knock on IT professionals. They also use their knowledge and expertise to make informed, effective decisions. However, without direct experience in the AV world, it’s a challenge for these individuals to make subjectively inclined, intentional decisions.

Important Questions

If you’re still on the fence regarding your need to consult with an AV expert, it’s time to dig deeper. Here are three questions you can answer to clear the air.

Who do you currently rely on to manage your AV requirements? Maybe you don’t have anyone on staff who does this. Maybe it’s an IT professional—or perhaps it’s someone with no technical experience at all. Knowing where you currently stand gives you a clear view of where you want to go.

Have you placed AV requirements under the “IT umbrella?” If the answer is no, you can move on. But if it’s yes, it’s time to address details such as their responsibilities, job performance to date, and willingness to complete AV-related tasks.

How would you use an AV expert to your advantage? Don’t hire an AV expert because you think it’s the right thing to do. Hire an expert because you have a project or require ongoing support.

[NAB: Broadcast Quality for the Next Generation]

It's easy to assume that AV and IT are interchangeable, but several differences prove otherwise. If you need an AV expert, don’t push the task onto an IT professional and hope for the best. Hiring the right person for the job improves the likelihood of a successful outcome.

This month’s AVNetwork Tech Talk is about the virtualization of hardware. Join AV Nation’s Tim Albright as he speaks with Smart Monkeys owner Stephan Villet about what this technology trend means, and how Smart Monkeys' ISAAC 2.0 platform can bring sensible IT concepts and technologies within the more conventional audio-video workflow.

Black Box is launching the Black Box Velocity Partner Program, which gives VARs and resellers across North and Latin America the programs, training, product authorization, and support to boost sales and revenues. Members of the Velocity Partner Program also gain access to strategic pricing incentive programs designed to assist in closing new business.

The benefits of joining the Black Box Velocity Partner Program include access to evaluation units for installation and testing, as well as reduced-cost products for demos and for sales and technical staff training. VARs and resellers can earn incentives for sales, registrations, authorizations and other customer loyalty activities. Velocity Partner Program members can take advantage of a four percent discount for any sale to federal, state, or local government body and for sales into the education market. When Black Box is in a competitive bid to win business, partners also can use the "meet comp" program to gain an edge in pricing.

Currently in phase 1 of the rollout, covering North America and Latin America, there are plans to expand the program internationally in the near future. All partners begin as Ruby Partners and then qualify for training and authorization across one or more of three key areas--pro IoT, pro AV, pro KVM--or as an authorized partner for all professional products 

"We've put fresh energy into our channel-focused offerings to help our partners sell more effectively and successfully," said CJ Ballejos, Vice President of Sales, Americas TPS at Black Box. "Combining resources across key areas of sales and support, the new Black Box Velocity Partner Program delivers a wide array of tools our partners can use to kick sales into high gear."

In the next few lessons we will discuss topics that were previously covered in the Byte-Sized series. However, in each case we will delve deeper into the topic and will discuss it in more detail. The first topic, the data link level, is one which is particularly important in the delivery of audio and is used in every implementation of TCP/IP.

The data link level of the OSI model (L2) sits between the physical level and the network layer. The physical level is primarily responsible for signal creation and timing on the media of choice—wires, fibers, or wireless. The network layer in TCP/IP is where IP exists. Its most critical function is the proper use of IP addresses, which are nearly always created in software. The data link layer is responsible for access to the physical media, for arranging the bit stream into frames, for controlling flow between stations attached to the media, and detecting errors. Since the primary data link technology used in TCP/IP is Ethernet, we will emphasize its implementation. However, in wide area technologies and data centers, there are several other methods in use.

[Byte-Sized Lesson: Understanding Error Control]

When the OSI model was conceived, its creators separated L2 into two parts. The upper part, responsible for sending and receiving messages to the IP level, was called logical link control (LLC). The lower level, responsible for sending and receiving the bit stream on the physical media, was called media access control (MAC). LLC was responsible for decisions about how the stream was to be formatted and how flow between the end stations was to be controlled. Additionally, it was to report if errors had occurred during transmission. However, in Ethernet, flow control is not used except in Wi-Fi. The MAC layer is different for wired Ethernet than for wireless Ethernet.

The MAC layer of wired Ethernet has not seen extensive variation as Ethernet has evolved from 10Mbps to 10Gbps. Frame synchronization is based on transmitting 56 alternating ones and zeros followed by the byte 10101011. Addressing has consistently been based on 48-bit physical addresses that we call the MAC addresses. In this way, the spanning tree protocol (STP) for bridges and switches can be implemented. STP automatically eliminates loops in the physical network and assures that there is only a single path between each pair of stations. Likewise, the MAC addresses allow for the implementation of shortest path bridging (SPB). SPB is the basis for mesh networks, which are widely used in computer centers and global spanning networks that want to avoid the issues of IP-level multicasting. 

In either wired or wireless Ethernet, error detection is done with a method call CRC-32. A code of 32 bits is divided into the bit stream using binary arithmetic. The remainder, which is always 32 bits in length, is appended to the frame as an error check code. Finally, a level of quality of service (QOS) or service priority can be implemented within L2.

So, with functions such as flow control, error detection, and QOS implemented at L2, why would engineers not choose to do the same at L3, the IP layer? The most important reason is because these functions can be done in firmware rather than in software. In nearly all cases, this makes their implementation more efficient.

Phil Hippenstel, EdD, is a regular columnist with AV Technology. He teaches information systems at Penn State Harrisburg. 

Good AV/IT tech managers know that addressing security concerns makes for a stronger relationship between their organization and the security team—and for smoother deployments. But it doesn’t stop there: when you’re well-versed in IT security concepts, you’re well-positioned to gain access to higher-level business discussions. One route to developing security expertise is through certification, and AV Technology recently explored what’s involved in earning what’s widely considered the gold standard of security certs: the Certified Information Systems Security Professional, or CISSP. 

Azeem Khan is senior consultant of application development (AV) at CIBC, a financial institution headquartered in Toronto. With a background in both security and AV, he is currently pursuing a CISSP—a logical step forward, he said. He believes that security knowledge is necessary in today’s networked environment, and holding a CISSP proves that one is capable of implementing and managing enterprise-level information security. “Nowadays at the enterprise level when we are putting all of these AV devices [on the network], it is our responsibility as AV specialists to be able to point out the security risks that we see when devices are communicating with each other,” he said. “As an AV specialist, you know how people interact with those devices, so you have more perspective on the security risk that comes from those devices versus people who are not from the AV domain.” 

[Staying Secure in the New Hybrid Workforce Model]

(ISC)2, headquartered in Clearwater, FL, is the professional organization that offers the CISSP. The CISSP comprises eight domains: security and risk management; asset security; security architecture and engineering; communication and network security; identity and access management (IAM); security assessment and testing; security operations; and software development security. (ISC)2 requires that candidates have five years of paid work experience in two of the eight domains (there are exceptions; visit the (ISC)2 website and download the CISSP Certification Exam Outline for more details).

“In IT and AV—and I consider AV part of IT—cybersecurity crosses many fields,” said Toni Hahn, content development manager at (ISC)2. “I feel everyone should know something about cybersecurity.” The CISSP, she explained, covers cybersecurity concepts, and the exam requires candidates to apply them. “AV could fit into almost every domain on the CISSP.”

The CISSP is not, however, for everyone. Damon Drake, content developer at (ISC)2, noted that sometimes organizations require job candidates to hold CISSPs for positions that don’t really require them. “We’ve seen [situations] where a company will have an entry-level position with entry-level pay requiring a CISSP certification,” he said. “It’s really a managerial-level cert. You’ve got to be able to look at risk management: how does that affect your physical security? How do you do access control—both physical and cyber?” There’s a lot to it, and as Drake puts it: “it’s not a beginner cert.”

Drake and Hahn should know. Both are ex-military (he was in the Air Force, she’s former Navy). While in the military, both worked in AV and IT. Once out, both worked in security engineering and management in mission-critical environments. Both failed the CISSP twice.

Drake recounts that when he first decided to prepare for the CISSP, he took an online course featuring many videos. When he didn’t pass his first exam, he did a boot camp. That didn’t bring the desired results either. 

[AV Network Nation Panel Addresses Networked Audio Security]

“A lot of it comes down to—and this is probably going to sound counter-intuitive—the more diverse your career is, the more you can get jaded by what companies do, as opposed to what the right thing to do is,” Drake said.

Because the questions on the CISSP exam are largely scenario-based, the “right thing to do” is the primary focus, Drake explained. But if you’ve been working in a company that has refused to invest in the application of security best practices, you may have developed a belief system that negates their necessity. This won’t be much help with the CISSP. “A lot of our questions are worded like, ‘What is the best? What is the most appropriate? What is the greatest?’ And although those are subjective terms, that is putting you in the best practice mindset. All of our questions are written that way to really focus on the best practice for whatever concept is being presented at the time. It’s really stepping back and almost being mentored by a manager and understanding the business functions, and then applying the cyber concepts to those.”

Like Drake, Hahn took a boot camp and failed her first exam. “Then I said, ‘well, I’m just going to study all these books and these practice questions,’” she recalled. “I thought I was really ready. They put the test in front of me and I actually asked the proctor—because this was back in the paper/pencil days—‘Are you sure you gave me the CISSP?’ He looks at the exam and he says, ‘Yup.’” After yet more studying—and another boot camp—the third time turned out to be the charm. 

[Byte-Sized Lesson: Security and TCP Handshakes]

Both Drake and Hahn agree that candidates should plan for a year’s worth of exam preparation. “One single boot camp, one class, one book, or one video series is probably not enough,” Hahn said. She advises people to cross-study and take the practice exams. Although they may not contain what is on the actual exam—sometimes practice exams focus on definitions, like “What is a disaster recovery plan?” rather than the scenario-based questions the CISSP exam tends to favor—she said that it helps people gain a deeper understanding of the concepts. “It all starts clicking. And so by the time you do sit for the exam, you know the concept—you’re not just memorizing [the definition of a disaster recovery plan]. You know the actual concept, and when you’re asked the [scenario-based] question, you can say, ‘You know what? This is what I would do.’”

Anishia Gopi, senior consultant of infrastructure engineering at CIBC, is also in the process of preparing for the CISSP exam. In addition to the official study guide and other materials, she has also participated in study groups. “Some people prefer to just sit with their book and go through it,” she said. While she said the book and online materials are definitely necessary, exchanging with other candidates helps to solidify the concepts. “If you have a group of people, you can share knowledge and tackle the scenario-based questions in a better way.” She also counsels candidates to examine the tasks they perform daily at work, and how they may relate to the exam preparation material. 

For Gopi, the CISSP provides the opportunity for meaningful professional development. “This is not just about adding a certification tag on your resume—it’s not just that,” she said. “You are taking a step toward being involved in making business decisions. It’s not easy—some of the modules are so difficult that you can easily give up. But I would say that if you are serious about that bigger goal, then it’s easier to pursue.”

Additional CISSP Tips

Hahn recalled that when she was working in AV, she was hands-on, ready to connect cables, configure systems, and perform the plethora of physical tasks associated with deploying a system. There is an element to the CISSP, she said, that more traditional AV professionals may be unfamiliar with. 

“They have to touch on the paperwork side,” Hahn said. “How do you do a business continuity plan? What is a disaster recovery plan? Is there anything I need to know about configuration management? What is a risk assessment? It’s more the paperwork—the policies, the procedures—that an audiovisual professional may have to study a little more. And probably the cryptography—it’s not its own domain anymore, but it is on the exam.”

Carolyn Heinze is a freelance writer/editor. 

Sometimes they have competing agendas, and sometimes they don’t understand each other. Sometimes they’re fighting over territory, and sometimes they’re just not communicating well (or too little, if at all). Whatever the case, getting AV and IT professionals to work well together can be a challenge. The good news? It doesn’t have to be this way.

One of the first steps AV tech managers can take in cultivating good AV/IT relations is by practicing good communications—and early on, according to Mathew Slack, lead infrastructure engineer at CIBC, a financial institution headquartered in Toronto. “It’s about having those conversations with those other IT groups—whether it’s the security team, or the architecture team, or the network team—and making sure that you lay the groundwork for that solid relationship through things like roadmap sessions, and discussing future projects and solutions with those peers well in advance,” he said. “I think a lot of the time, network teams or security teams are scrambling to solve something in the AV space because a lot of AV systems and solutions are custom. Having those conversations very early brings everyone together for a common understanding of what the solution is going to be.”

Related: How IT Departments Really View Networked AV

Matt North is the learning spaces technology manager at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich, U.K. He relayed that he and his team of four technicians provide both AV and IT support, and North is also involved in system upgrades and new deployments. He described an effective working relationship between AV and IT at the university, and attributed this to the fact that the AV team operates within the IT department. “I think that structure has quite a big part to play in it—especially in a university environment, where hierarchy and structure tend to take dominance in terms of how well things move, and how communication flows,” he said.

Last summer, North and his team performed a large AV-over-IP rollout in UEA’s New Science Building. Leading up to the deployment, North—who said his background was largely AV-centric prior to joining the university staff in 2017—recounted his efforts to gain a better understanding of IT. “It was quite a learning curve for me to start dealing in network terminology, understanding network principles, and things like that,” he said. “I think that project certainly wouldn’t have been the success that it now is if it wasn’t for me being able to establish that really close working relationship with the networking team.” He relayed that engaging with IT at the outset was key: “They were informed and well-versed in what we were trying to do, so they could ensure that they were able to deliver the quality of service on the network that we were expecting, in order for our systems to perform as designed and as our users required them to. We brought them into the conversations with manufacturers, they were able to ask questions, and ultimately, they had some influence in the decision over the product that we selected.” 

Prior to becoming chairman of the AV User Group, a global community of AV end user professionals headquartered in London, Owen Ellis worked as an AV executive at the corporate enterprise level. He recounted that his organization was putting AV hardware on the main corporate network as early as 2004, which mandated that Ellis and his team gained an understanding of the ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) framework of best practices, and IT Service Management (ITSM) principles.

“The lessons that we learned from that and the benefit we got from it was phenomenal,” Ellis said, describing the processes AV was now required to follow. “[For example], every time a software release or firmware release came out, we had to justify not imposing it or why we were imposing it, and we would always give feedback to the manufacturer. It kept you alert to the products in the space that we were using, and for me, [it] was really about learning about IT.” 

Ellis argued that even in organizations that keep AV and IT separate, AV-centric professionals stand to benefit from getting educated about IT best practices. “When you’ve got a global organization with thousands of devices connected to that AV network, and you get a problem with one of them, you’re going to get a problem with all of them—especially if it’s software or firmware—and you need the processes in place to be able to deal with that when it happens,” he said. “If you haven’t followed those really good, structured, ITIL/IT Service Management processes, you’ll get into trouble, [and] it will have a massive impact on your organization, because you could end up with thousands of rooms, globally, with problems.” 

Mike Pedersen, CTS-D, CTS-I, EAVA, is audiovisual experience manager at Iowa State University in Ames, IA. (Pedersen is also council chair for AVIXA’s Technology Managers Council.) Like North, his team works under IT—in his case, the IT Services Office of the CIO. He said that he’s taken an ITIL foundations course to better speak the language of IT. “Just being able to go in with that background makes those conversations [with IT] go a whole lot easier, and you get a whole lot more respect from the network folks when you can do that,” he said. He encourages AV professionals to make the effort to get educated on the ITIL framework, and to consult with their own IT teams to get input on what other knowledge and skills they should be developing. 

Pedersen also noted the importance of prioritizing security—and letting IT know AV is concerned about it. At Iowa State, he’s currently developing a process whereby he hands off new devices to the network security team for testing prior to putting them on the network. This way, if the network team is uncomfortable with certain devices, these issues can be addressed before any problems arise.

It’s also important that AV and IT are communicating regularly, Pedersen said. He suggests routine meetings (at least once a month), rather than ad hoc conversations. “It just shows that you care what’s going on from a network perspective,” he said. “It shows that it’s important to you, and then you want to establish that ongoing rapport.” This, he said, helps to strengthen the AV/IT relationship as time goes on. 

For Slack, in order for AV and IT to work well together, they must be viewed as part of a single entity. “I think the first challenge is the perception that AV is separate from IT,” he said. “To me, AV is a subset of IT, no different than how a network team, a storage team, or a server team is part of a greater IT organization. It’s really that change in mindset.”

A Pandemic Positive?

Slack said that one positive side effect of the COVID-19 crisis is that it has strengthened the relationship between AV and IT.

“AV and IT have definitely grown closer as the need for hybrid learning and meetings has increased,” he said. “The need for well thought-out AV solutions that integrate seamlessly with collaboration and virtual event platforms is now well understood by all stakeholders within a company. This really helps in the conversations in prioritizing other IT teams’ time to work on these solutions. What’s emerged from the pandemic is AV is no longer an island. We can’t build an isolated, custom solution in a room. We need to think about AV in our solutions as part of an integrated, end-to-end solution that enables companies to be more productive. And really looking at: how does the room interact with hybrid learning and meeting environments, and really understanding the remote experience as well as the in-person experience. That only works when you have that integrated, end-to-end view.”

Carolyn Heinze is a freelance writer/editor. 

Often we discuss errored packets that are dropped without understanding the underlying techniques that determine why the packets are discarded. There are checks for errors at several protocol layers. As a result, packets are checked for problems at several points in the network and also at various levels when they are received at the destination.

The first examination that is made on nearly all packets is at layer two. It is called the frame check sequence (FCS). Each Ethernet frame has a four-byte field appended to the end of the frame that is the result of a calculation done by the sender. The input to the calculation is comprised of all the fields in the frame. Each switch, router, and end station recalculates the FCS. If the result is different from the one recorded in the frame, the frame is dropped. If just one bit has been corrupted, the likelihood the value matches the receiver’s calculated result is considerably below one in a billion. An assumption in the process is that a higher layer will deal with the issue of retransmissions.

Related: Byte-Sized Lesson: What Causes Latency?

The IP field also contains an error check code called the checksum. This value is calculated by using all the fields in the IP header. However, unlike with Ethernet, the data is not included in the calculation. IP is not responsible for detecting corrupt payload data. Since the calculation uses the hop count field, which changes with each router, the IP checksum changes each time the packet is routed. The next router will discard the packet if the code in the header does not match the checksum it computes.

The layer-four protocols, TCP and UDP, have different ways for dealing with errors in packets. At the destination, TCP does a calculation that is based on the TCP header, the payload data, and critical fields in the IP header. (These fields are sometimes referred to the IP pseudo-header.) Nevertheless, if the calculation does not match the values stored in the checksum field, TCP simply discards the packet. Contrary to popular belief, TCP does not explicitly inform the sender of this discard. It just doesn’t acknowledge receipt of the segment. Because of the sequencing of the segments, the sender will eventually realize that the segment was not properly received and it will be retransmitted.

Related: Byte-Sized Lesson: Network Buffers

UDP does not make provision for retransmission, but it does perform an error check. UDP does not want to pass a segment of data up to the application layer if there is an error in its header. This is especially important because that header contains the port that properly identifies the correct receiving application. 

When error checking of the payload data is not included, the receiver gets invalid data. This can become evident in VoIP, especially if compression is being used: the user may hear distortion of the sound. On the contrary, in adaptive bitrate video such as Apple’s HLS, TCP is being used. Corrupted data will be retransmitted before it is played. Therefore, although delay might increase, the video should play out correctly.

Phil Hippenstel, EdD, is a regular columnist with AV Technology. He teaches information systems at Penn State Harrisburg. 

The What: NETGEAR has expanded its new series of IP switches designed and purpose built for the growing AV-over-IP market with the M4250 series. Dubbed the AV Line, these products combine years of networking expertise with best practices from experts in the professional AV market.

The What Else: The switches feature AV-specific configuration presets designed to dramatically simplify deployment of AV networks. The NETGEAR IGMP Plus functionality along with new Auto-LAG and Auto-Trunk features allow pro AV installers to connect multiple M4250 switches together seamlessly without compromising audio and video signal quality and integrity. Removing complex configuration tasks enables the installer to focus on other important aspects of an AV install job, saving both time and money.

Pro AV installers no longer need to compromise the usability of their AV network with complex switch settings that are not AV friendly and commands that are typical of switches that were designed for an IT network as opposed to an AV network. The new AV interface of the M4250 switch presents the common AV controls with user-selectable profiles up front, making it a snap to ensure the settings are correct for specific audio or video applications.

Related: 10 Things You Need to Know About the NETGEAR M4250

The M4250 switches are designed for clean integration with traditional rack-mounted AV equipment. The sleek, black enclosure provides port and activity status on the front panel, with all power and network cabling neatly organized on the rear panel. The M4250 switches can also be reverse mounted in an AV rack if that is what an installer prefers. Additional options for mounting the switch outside a rack, such as VESA mounts, are also available. The M4250 switches come with pre-drilled universal threaded holes located on the bottom and the front of each switch.

Pro AV installers can take advantage of free design services offered by NETGEAR’s Pro AV Engineering Services team that comprises AV-over-IP experts located strategically around the world to enable rapid turnaround to installer requests. Installers are encouraged to reach out to the Pro AV Engineering Services team for upcoming projects via email: ProAVDesign@netgear.com.

“NETGEAR has pioneered IP switches that address the specific needs of the pro AV industry by closely collaborating with professional audiovisual installers to better understand the unique challenges they face with AV deployments,” said Patrick Lo, chairman and CEO of NETGEAR. “Out-of-the-box AV functionality, AV configuration presets, an AV friendly user interface design, and large PoE budgets make NETGEAR’s AV Line the industry’s most comprehensive offering of network switches for AV over IP.” 

The Bottom Line: The AV Line of M4250 switches maintains the same out-of-the-box AV friendly functionality found on the popular M4300 and M4500 switches for the industry’s most popular AV-over-IP encoders and decoders. As such, deploying multicast AV over IP networks with the M4250 switches is a simple plug-in and turn-on operation. 

The new NETGEAR AV Line M4250 series switches and AVB licenses will be available in the United States, Europe, and the APAC region as of late February 2021.

This is the second part of our two-part lesson. Here we will also address some basic IP principles that seem to be overlooked. In this lesson we are going to focus on two fundamental ideas: half duplex versus full duplex and statistical multiplexing.

Half-duplex refers to transmitting one way at a time. Full-duplex is transmitting both directions simultaneously. For example, some Ethernet interface cards can be set to transmit in either mode. Full duplex is technically possible in the 100Mbps version of Ethernet because the pair of wires used to transmit is different from the pair that is used to receive. However, most business IP applications rarely operate in full-duplex mode. Generally, the client requests one or more files and the server sends them. Even within a large file transfer, the server uses TCP to send one or more segments, after which the client acknowledges receipt of those segments. On the other hand, delivery methods that use UDP are generally half duplex. An example is IPTV, and such applications send in one direction only.

Related: Byte-Sized Lesson: Overlooked IP Basics

Half duplex and full duplex are sometimes confused with asynchronous and synchronous. In data communications terminology, synchronous means to be based on or to follow a clock. Think of an orchestra following the motion of the conductor’s downbeats. Unfortunately, as often happens, social media, educators, and popular culture have tried to adopt and apply these terms. However, in this context, asynchronous more closely follows the idea of half duplex. Likewise, when it is used this way, synchronous usually means simultaneously as in full duplex.

The term statistical multiplexing was widely used in the 1980s and 90s to refer to a method of asynchronous transfers done at layer two. Wide area network connections used telephone connections called dedicated or leased lines. They were private point-to-point circuits. By today’s standards, they were slow. A customer might lease a dedicated circuit that provided 9600bps and insert statistical multiplexors to simulate communications that exceeded that capacity. For example, six terminals each capable of communicating at 2400bps would be connected. This was possible because not all of the terminals needed the circuit at any given instant. While statistical multiplexing, as it was previously known, is nearly nonexistent today, the underlying concept is still commonly used. The basic idea is that many devices share a common media to communicate. This is exactly what Wi-Fi does. The common media is the air. And, like 1980s stat muxes, the transmitting interface card or access point must compete for the use of the air to communicate. Sometimes, it seems we recycle technologies.

NETGEAR recently announced its latest series of switches designed from the ground up for AV over IP. Dubbed the AV Line, the M4250 offers performance enhancements over standard networking switches, as well as features that simplify the work of integrators and tech managers. Here are the top-ten things you need to know about these new switches.

Download your free copy of the 10 Things You Need to Know About the NETGEAR M4250.

Latency is discussed widely in the AV industry. However, we’ll now focus on one aspect that is almost never considered: the impact of latency on TCP based video flows. These flows include adaptive bitrate streams such as HLS, DASH, and NDI. Since they are based on TCP, their transmission rate, frequency, and retransmission rules are subject to the TCP algorithm. This is where we need to look more closely.

There are three popular versions of TCP: TCP Reno, Cubic, and Compound. Their essential operation is similar, so for simplicity, we will base this discussion on TCP Reno. When a device has a TCP stream to transmit, it negotiates with the proposed receiver and is told a receive window that the partner device will be using. This is the number of bytes it can hold in its receive buffer. Common window sizes are 128kB, 256kB, or multiples of these sizes. The sender also initiates a sending block size, usually symbolized by the term cwnd, which is typically four TCP segments. When transmission begins, all four segments are sent. The sender waits for acknowledgement of that block of four. The receiver’s behavior is quite different. It acknowledges every other segment. So, it will acknowledge the second segment and then the fourth segment.

Related: Byte-Sized Lesson: Network Buffers

With the assurance that the receiver has all four segments, the sender raises cwnd to eight, or double its previous value. It immediately sends all eight segments and awaits acknowledgement of that group. The receiver again acknowledges receipt of every other segment. Following the same pattern, the sender will continue to double cwnd and await the acknowledgement of the entire block of data. The rapid escalation will slow when cwnd reaches half of the receiver’s advertised window. Then the sender will increase cwnd by increments of one. Notice that if the cwcn is eight and just one of the segments gets lost, dropped, or is simply delayed in a busy buffer, the sender must wait for acknowledgement of every segment in the block.

The purpose of this process is to gradually saturate the link between the sender and the receiver. The sender will back off its transmission rate when it gets notification that a packet was dropped by the network or the receiver. While that is a topic for another lesson, we have enough understanding to assess the impact of latency on the TCP process. Latency impacts the transmission rate because the sender must wait for all the packets sent under the current cwnd to be acknowledged. It is also important to note that the latency in the return path is critical. If the acknowledgements are slow to get back to the sender, the sender will continue to await the acknowledgement of the entire block. This aspect of TCP operation is typically overlooked. This can be a significant problem on asymmetric bandwidth links sold to consumers. Telco, DSL, and cable links are often 10 times bigger in the downward direction than in the upward direction. In receiving ABR video, it is the upward connection that is carrying the acknowledgements. High traffic on the upward link, such as a video upload, will cause significant slowing of any download.

Phil Hippenstel, EdD, is a regular columnist with AV Technology. He teaches information systems at Penn State Harrisburg. 

In the first article of this series we discussed the reasons for the division between AV and IT when it comes to the IP video. We pointed out that AV has concerns about the quality of output, latency in the delivery, and the choice of which standards to follow. These standards are mostly proprietary. We also explained that IT’s concerns are focused on the characteristics of a particular packet flow, how that traffic will interact with other business-critical traffic and whether VLANs are required. We also mentioned some tools that can help analyze, monitor, and emulate IP video flows. However, only a few of these can provide significant support for video flows. Now, we want to go into more detail about AV and IT standards, support tools, and the bridge that pro AV may provide for these two groups to move closer together.

Players

There seems to be three distinct groups on the AV side: broadcasters, pro AV proponents, and those focused on enterprise distribution of video. The broadcasters are organized under the umbrella organization of JT-NM (Joint Task Force on Networked Media). Broadcasters primarily follow the standards published by SMPTE (The Society of Motion Pictures and Television Engineers), the VSF (Video Services Forum), and the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). With over 7,000 members, SMPTE has promulgated standards and guidelines to aid in the evolution to IP-based delivery of video. These standards are universally recognized by ANSI (American National Standards Institute), ISO (International Standards Organization), the IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission), and the ITU (International Telecommunications Union). An example of the group’s work is the series of 2110 specifications. These cover managed IP video flows and address timing, traffic shaping, ancillary data, stream switching when using RTP, and other topics. The role of VSF is to identify issues involving the development, deployment, operation, and security of media networking technologies. The broadcasters use some of the IEEE standards to address timing as part of the 2110 series. According to Jack Douglass of Packetstorm Communications, who is active in SMTPE, VSF, and JT-NM, VSF is a consortium of companies that create the first version of a standard. That version is passed along to SMPTE, which will typically ratify it.  

Related: The Technology Manager's Guide to the State of AV Over IP

The migration of video within the pro AV industry to IP is being promoted by AIMS (The Alliance for IP Media Solutions). They have created a working group whose efforts will be based on evaluating and recommending existing standards and specifications from AES (Audio Engineering Society), AWMA (Advanced Workflow Media Association), VSF, SMPTE, IEEE, and IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force). This is a mix of standards that have traditionally come from both the broadcast and IT industries.

Those who are primarily responsible for enterprise distribution of IP video usually follow the standards promulgated by the IT industry. These mainly come from the internet community and the IEEE. Standards published by the IETF are called RFCs (requests for comments). They may be proposed, drafted, or ratified. Occasionally, even a proposed RFC gets the support of the industry and almost becomes a de facto standard. Examples of video related RFCs include RFC 6184-RTP Payload Format for H.264 Video and RFC 7478, which pertains to WebRTC use cases and requirements.

Standards

There is one more significant difference between the way the AV and IT industries use standards. In the AV industry, there is a greater reliance on proprietary standards that are promoted by individual vendors or groups of companies. There are many examples of this: Audinate promotes Dante. Haivision and Wowza introduced and endorse SRT (Secure Reliable Transport); Newtek, now part of Vizrt, is embracing NDI (Network Device Interface). 

While proprietary standards meet customer needs for the most part, IT network managers are generally not enthusiastic about on them for two reasons. First, interoperability with vendor equipment using other standards becomes problematic. Second, the tools often used by IT departments, discussed later in this article, rarely recognize the traffic types specified by these standards. This makes monitoring and troubleshooting network traffic more challenging. While IT can use most of their tools to analyze FTP flows, web browsing, and VoIP, they don’t have any tools that recognize and identify traffic following the SRT or NDI specifications.

Tools

Now, we turn our attention to tools that can help support video flows. All of these tools are dependent on the important concept of packet structure. All IP video packets have defined packet formats. These usually include at least Ethernet, IP, and UDP or TCP headers. The tools discussed here read these headers and make their analysis. Such tools usually fall into one of three categories: analysis tools, monitoring tools, and emulation tools.

Analysis tools capture packets, dissect the headers, and then create reports, graphs, charts, and other visualization aids to help the user understand the flow of which the packet is a part. The premier example of this type of tool is Wireshark, which is free. This software product will show the packets in the order they are captured, allow you to filter on individual flows, and decode any headers that aren’t encrypted. It will list devices, protocols, communications flows, overall bandwidth, as well as bandwidth use by individual devices, and give many other useful facts. Also, it will build graphs showing comparative network use by different applications and servers. Another tool, which is not free, is Observer from Viavi. It does many of the same things that Wireshark does but features the ability to capture traffic at line rates on networks operating up to 40Gbps. By using specialized hardware, it allows the storage of terabytes of data allowing for longitudinal analysis of the data flows.

While there is some overlap between analysis and monitoring tools, the latter focus on tracking flows of various senders and receivers, to try to sense when those flows are behaving properly. These products usually feature screens that show bandwidth levels, error levels, and other parameters on a real-time basis. Most will key the flow as good, poor, or failing with a color code such as green, yellow, and red. Solarwinds is one of the more capable products, but it is primarily for large enterprise operations. It will allow a view of the overall topology of the network, list all VLANs, and indicate where problems are developing. Unfortunately, most tools in this category are not oriented toward audio or video flows.

Network emulation tools are designed to allow users to simulate or duplicate real network links and connections. They can be extremely useful for pre-deployment testing or existing network links where new or additional applications will be deployed. Suppose, for example, that you know that the connection between two locations has 50 ms. latency and jitter of 30 ms. You can mimic this with network emulation hardware (FPGA) or software. There are inexpensive tools from iTrinegy and Netropy. These can be useful for such a purpose. 

Bridging the Gap

So, will the AV and IT industries continue to have this gap in concerns and knowledge? It may depend on whether cross-training takes place. The AV industry must consciously reach out to IT to explain the different types of video and how they should behave on IP networks. For example, ABR video has little in common with MPTS streams such as in IPTV implementations. IT departments should also provide training to those responsible for adding video streams to the network. This is especially true for ABR video, which is sensitive to loss and delay. But the effect is significantly different than it would be for most other video streams.

Phil Hippenstel, EdD, is a regular columnist with AV Technology. He teaches information systems at Penn State Harrisburg. 

AV and IT are converging, but how well does each side know the other? Perhaps nowhere is this lack of mutual understanding more evident than in their respective knowledge gaps on video. In the first feature in a two-part series, we take a high-level look at the ways the two sides approach this crucial subject. 

Related: The Technology Manager's Guide to the State of AV Over IP

Gaps in Knowledge

First, we’ll analyze the IT group. Most members of the IT staff have little knowledge of the various video types that are on their network. Mention SRT, SDVoE, or NDI and you rarely get a response. Nearly all have no awareness of the standards that describe the transport of video over IP networks. Likewise, they have not heard of SMPTE or VSF. In a recent interview of the IT staff of a major university, the only term from the list of protocol and standards bodies that the group recognized was NDI. Yet, they are standards driven. Their dominant standards come from the IETF, IEEE, and Cisco. Most of these standards are not about video. Yet, they recognize that the dominant data type on their network is video. Almost all IT network managers are aware that packet loss and jitter can affect video. But few could describe the different effect these two parameters have on ABR video versus IPTV. Also, they rarely consider the impact of latency on the delivery of video. IT cares about latency and loss because they affect TCP throughput. Plus, TCP carries ninety percent or more of their business traffic.

Let us turn our attention to the AV group. They do not realize how important it is to monitor traffic flows on the network. They have little knowledge of the tools that IT uses to monitor those flows. Such tools have been in use for decades. Companies that make monitoring and troubleshooting tools like Viavi and Netscout are not discussed on the AV show floor. AV pays little attention to buffering the packet flows unless the discussion is about the receiver’s buffer. IT is primarily concerned with network buffers. (See this issue’s Byte-Sized Lesson.) 

Contrasting Concerns

What factors of the network are of primary concern to IT? There are at least three. First, will the traffic be bursty like adaptive bitrate or a constant, high-volume stream like IPTV? Bursty traffic hurts TCP applications. High-volume streams do not share well with other high-volume applications. Second, if a new application such as a video server comes on the network, how will its network transmissions affect other existing traffic? Will the video disrupt VoIP calls? Will they slow responses to cloud access applications such as Office 365? Will database queries and responses be slowed? Even in a car dealership, there will be significant dissatisfaction if the parts database queries slow down due to the deployment of a new streaming server. Also, does this new application need a separate network or at least a separate VLAN? If it needs to be segregated into a separate VLAN, should routing between that VLAN and the rest of the network be permitted?

Turning now to the AV concerns, what do we see as their primary focus? We will base this on the discussions that happen in magazines like this one and what you often hear on the floor at trade shows like InfoComm. Most are discussions and debates about three concerns: output quality, the necessary network infrastructure for each audio or video type, and video characteristics. The latter includes color, bit depth, and luma and color sampling method. In discussions with many IT departments, I have never heard one of these factors mentioned. 

Standards, Standards, Standards

So, because both AV and IT claim to be standards-based, can we find common ground there? Not in this case. We mentioned previously that each group has little knowledge of the other’s standards. This is understandable. The AV standards come in two forms. One form, usually called dejure standards, comes from the Video Services Forum, SMPTE, the MPEG group, or IEEE. Defacto standards come from Audinate, NewTek, Wowza, Haivision, and other manufacturers. The IT group depends on the IEEE, IETF, TIA, and defacto standards from Cisco. Note that the IEEE is the only standards body to which both adhere. The problem is that they follow different IEEE standards. Even within the 802.1 family that specifies AVB, the IT industry uses the part that specifies VLANs. In a discussion with the university IT department of a major university, not one person on the call had ever heard of IEEE AVB or TSN.

What tools are available that could help AV and IT understand the video traffic on their networks? There are three types and they have varying functionality relative to audio or video. Protocol analysis tools, often called sniffers, are capable of capturing packets and decoding or dissecting them. They interpret the fields in each packet and describe their meaning in a user-friendly manner. In the IT environment they have been used for decades and include products like Wireshark, which is free, and Viavi Observer, which can cost thousands of dollars. Typically, these tools also include functions such as listing the address of network devices, showing the level of activity of the devices, and providing many graphs that help describe the network traffic flows. They will report bandwidth use, loss, jitter for certain traffic types, and detailed analysis of TCP sessions. Unfortunately, many are weak in the analysis of video. Most of the typical IT tools see RTP as the potential indication of video. However, they do not recognize ABR, IPTV, SRT, SDVoE, NDI, NVS, or other video flows. Surprisingly, the one exception is Wireshark. It can dissect both MPEG Transport video and SMPTE 2110 streams.

Some tools are focused primarily on monitoring the flows and assessing the quality of the output. They also vary considerably in price and functionality. Some that are cost-free monitor a single stream. Others, whose price can easily reach thousands of dollars, can monitor many streams and let you observe the videos on a Hollywood-squares screen. TSReader, a free products from Telestream, can be costly.

The third family of tools is called network emulators. These are designed to allow the emulation of a real network in a lab or the emulation of a network segment added to a real network. For example, they could be used for pre-deployment testing in a lab setting. The user could simulate a connection between their video server and the playout device. They could also add elements with varying loss, jitter, and latency characteristics. Products in this family come from PacketStorm Communications, ITrinegy, Netropy, and others. They also vary significantly in price, based to a great extent on their capabilities. For example, some of these tools can take real traffic from a network and retransmit it in a lab setting over an emulated network. This is an important feature if you are developing a new transport method. With some, you can play the stream through your emulated path, change the characteristic of the path, add competing traffic, and play it again. You can even add real playout devices to see what the user experience will be like under each scenario.

The next part in this series will discuss the different areas that are involved heavily in video transport: broadcast, pro AV, and enterprise distribution. We will address the standards for each of the groups and the potential role for pro AV to act as a bridge between the broadcasters and the enterprise users. Also, we will thoroughly inquire into the tools manufactured for each group to emulate, analyze, monitor, and troubleshoot video flows.

The What: Netgear has announced the availability of GS716TP and GS716TPP, two new 16-port Gigabit Ethernet PoE+ Smart Managed Pro Switches with two SFP ports with optional cloud management and 180W and 300W Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) budgets, respectively.

The What Else: Both of these new Smart Managed Pro Switches are positioned to provide the small business landscape with increased value thanks to configurable L2 network features like VLANs and PoE operation scheduling, allowing secure deployment of PoE-based devices. Advanced features such as DiffServ QoS, LACP link aggregation, and Spanning Tree will satisfy even the most advanced small or medium business networks. In addition, they will allow network segregation and secure backup networking, as well as full control over PoE network availability. The latest switches are purposely designed for converged networks where voice, video, and data are all carried on a single network platform.

Related: The Technology Manager's Guide to the State of AV Over IP 

“These new Smart Managed Pro switches from Netgear bring enterprise-class networking to budget-sensitive SMBs. As a leading provider of network equipment for SMBs, Netgear understands the importance of providing a great selection of PoE port counts and PoE power budgets that can adapt to business needs, whether in office, hospitality, catering, education or retail domains,” explains Richard Jonker, VP Product Management, Netgear Business.

Features include Single-Sign-On (SSO) registration for firmware and security updates and warranty entitlement and remote/cloud management capability with Netgear Insight. Users can instantly activate Netgear Insight Cloud management from the web GUI. A one-year one-device subscription to Netgear Insight Premium or Insight Pro is also included with the purchase of each of these switches.

By activating Netgear Insight Cloud management, users will enable management features allowing businesses simpler configuration and deployment from anywhere. This can be done using the Netgear Insight app from mobile devices or the Insight Cloud Portal from any device with a web browser.

GS716TP and GS716TPP include advanced features for SMBs, such as:

• 180W PoE budget across 16 Gigabit PoE+ ports (GS716TP)
• 300W PoE budget across 16 Gigabit PoE+ ports (GS716TPP)
• Two dedicated Gigabit SFP fiber ports for active-active or active-passive redundant connections in aggregation to your network core
• Quiet rack mounting operation with 28.2dB max at 25°C (77°F) ambient
• Advanced VLAN support for better network segmentation
• Access control lists (ACLs) for granular network access control including 802.1x port authentication
• Advanced per port PoE controls for remote power management of PoE connected devices including operation scheduling (e.g. Wireless APs, IP security cameras, VoIP phones, LED lighting, secure access door locks and other IoT devices)
• Advanced QoS (Quality of Service) for traffic prioritization including port-based, 802.1p and L2/L3/L4 DSCP-based
• Auto “denial-of-service” (DoS) prevention
• Energy Efficient Ethernet (IEEE 802.3az) for maximum power savings

The Bottom Line: The GS716TP and GS716TPP Gigabit Smart Managed Pro Switches are designed for advanced small and medium organizations looking for a combination of features, performance, and value.

NETGEAR GS716TP and GS716TPP are available and shipping today in the US, Europe, and Asia.

In the AV industry, we often think of the delivery of audio or video in terms of three major components: the source, the network, and the receiver or playout device. Many researchers in the IT industry recently have changed their view about the delivery of data. The current idea is that insufficient recognition has been given to the importance of network buffers. The AV industry is using the same IP protocol stack as the IT industry, so shouldn’t the AV industry be studying the role of buffers as well?

Buffers are temporary storage modules used to hold data while it awaits processing by a device. For example, a switch or router has input and output buffers for each interface. The sending encoder, computer, or camera has both input and output buffers. Buffers vary in size. Router buffers routinely range from 16 megabytes to 256 megabytes. As a result, there often can be dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of packets in a buffer at any instance.

Related: Byte-Sized Lesson: Security and TCP Handshakes

While buffers are necessary to prevent dropping packets, they also add delay or latency in the delivery of the packets. The research about buffers in the IT industry focuses on two things: (1) How big should buffers be to accommodate a wide variety of traffic types? (2) How should the sending device estimate the size of the most congested buffer in the path? The second of these questions has been the focus of intense study and has caused some recommendations for changes in the protocols. 

So, why the concern about the most congested buffer? Nearly 90 percent of worldwide network traffic is carried by the TCP protocol. This protocol estimates the amount of data it should be sending based on the following idea. We will start with a low level and increase it rather aggressively until we get a report that a buffer was too congested (overfilled) and dropped a packet. Then, we will cut our sending rate by 30 or 50 percent and start increasing the sending rate again. However, in modern gigabit and 10-gigabit networks over ever-increasing distances, the algorithm has a severe problem. The notification that a packet was dropped by a buffer may arrive at the source long after it was sent. Consequently, hundreds of additional packets may already be in transit. If the problem buffer is full, it is likely that these packets also will be dropped. This also means that the retransmission of the first dropped packet will be delayed by being in line behind the additional sent packets.

Currently, Google and some others are recommending significant changes to the TCP algorithm. In their design, dropped packets will not be the trigger for reducing the sending level. It will be based on trying to estimate the size of the bottleneck buffer and maintaining a sending level that avoids overfilling that buffer. However, getting widespread adoption of a modified TCP algorithm could take considerable time.

Phil Hippenstel, EdD, is a regular columnist with AV Technology. He teaches information systems at Penn State Harrisburg. 

The Technology Manager's Guide to the State of AV Over IP

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Manufacturers Discuss Their Place in Convergence

Whether AV over IP, SDVoE, or another flavor, the shift to AV on the network has had a slower uptake than the industry had expected. Why is this? We know this topic is full of strong convictions, so we asked thought leaders from several of the industry’s top AV companies to share their perspective on the State of AV over IP and provide a glimpse of their roadmap. 

New AV-over-IP Products

This roundup showcases the latest products from top manufacturers.

Download the Technology Manager's Guide to the State of AV Over IP.

This month, we shift our focus to an important security issue. We will combine some information about IP addresses, the TCP three-way handshake, and the role of the firewall. This security issue is important if you have an encoder, camera, or other device that periodically goes back to the manufacturer’s website to register its license or get updates. First, we require some background information.

There are two broad classes of IP addresses: public and private. Public addresses are intended for use outside private networks and are used in the public internet. Private addresses are to be used only on private enterprise networks such as those of schools, businesses, and hospitals. Addresses beginning with 192.168, 10, or 172.176 are nearly always private addresses. The firewall or residential gateway acting as a firewall, usually is placed between the public network (outside) and private network (inside). (We will interchange the terms “firewall” and “gateway” for this discussion.) One of the major roles of the firewall is to convert private addresses to public address and vice versa. 

Related: Byte-Sized Lesson: Troubleshooting Connectivity

Two more facts are important. A TCP session is uniquely identified by four number patterns: the source IP address, the source port number, the destination IP address, and the destination port number. The client treats these four numbers as tags on the session and the server does the same thing. When the first packet in a session is sent from the client to the server, the firewall intercepts the flow and acts as a proxy. It will act as the end point of the session for the client by replacing the server’s IP address with its own address using a different port number. Then, it will forward the connection request to the server using the ISP’s public address that was assigned to the client’s location.

This may seem complicated. So, we’ll use this example (see the diagram above for reference). Your camera is assigned the address 192.168.3.31. The server is at 138.11.2.65. Your gateway is likely 192.168.3.1. Finally, your ISP assigned the address 202.16.32.59 to your gateway interface. Using the common notation (IP address: port number), the connection between the client and the gateway might be (192.168.3.31: 5050) to (192.168.3.1:5454) and then (202.16.32.59:4040) to (138.11.2.65:2090). Note that the internal connection uses only a private address. Likewise, the external connection uses only public addresses.

Now, consider the security implication of this procedure. The TCP handshake that establishes a connection is comprised of a three-way exchange of packets to negotiate the parameters to be used in the session. The first packet is simply a request by the client to open a session. The response from the server acknowledges the request and usually agrees with the set of parameters. The third packet, sent by the client, confirms the receipt of the second packet.

Now, it is practicable for the firewall to determine whether the initiator of the session is inside or outside. If the first packet is sent to a public address, the client is inside. If the first packet is sent to a private address, the client is outside. In the latter case, the session will be denied by directly dropping the packet. We don’t want sessions established by devices in the public internet.

In the previous lesson, we reviewed the ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol). It’s the basis for the applications ping and traceroute. If you recall from that lesson, when you ping an address with a command like ping 8.8.8.8, you will likely get several responses in this form: Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes 32 time 27 ms TTL=55.

Ping can be used to troubleshoot problems on your network. Typically, you can ping an IP address or a computer’s name. Suppose a camera can’t deliver its captured video to a server named MCC_storage at the address 192.168.3.100. Let’s also suppose the camera is using the address 192.168.3.13. Using a laptop inserted into the network with a proper address such as 192.168.3.222, you can issue a ping to the server’s address. If you get a successful reply, but the video still can’t be delivered, try issuing the command ping MCC_storage. If this fails, it tells you that there is a name resolution problem. Either the name server doesn’t know of MCC_storage or it is not listed in the local hosts file. Check whether the camera stores a local hosts file. If not, you’ll find the DNS server and investigate why it is not able to respond to the camera’s DNS query.

Related: Byte-Sized Lesson: ICMP Revisited

In some instances, ping can also be used to diagnose network slowness issues. Pick an address you are sure is valid. We’ll assume such an address is 8.8.8.8. Now issue the command ping 8.8.8.8 /t. This causes continuous pings to be issued. By studying the response times, you can often discover periodic bursts of competing traffic causing the reply time to increase substantially. Use Wireshark to capture traffic and you may be able to see where the competing traffic originates.

Now, let’s turn our attention to the application traceroute. In Windows 10, the command is tracert and its use is similar to the use of ping. Let’s say you issue the command tracert 8.8.8.8. You get a response that looks something like this:

1.  <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms my_router [192.168.3.1]

2.  1 ms 1 ms <1 ms my_modem [192.168.3.2]

3.  4 ms 4 ms 4ms my_ISP_router [172.116.31.31]

4.  14 ms 14 ms 14ms Next_ISP_router [220.220.220.220]

5.  Etc.

6.  ...

7.  ...

8.  ...

9.  26 ms 26ms 26 ms dns.google [8.8.8.8]

The traceroute application is showing the list of routers in the path and the successive times used to transmit each link between them. Traceroute uses a clever implementation of the IP address field called the TTL (time-to-live), more commonly called the hop count. In the first step, the tracert issues a ping with the hop count set to zero. All routers are required to discard all packets with such a hop count but are also required to send the source a report that it did this. So, my_router reported back to the source. Then the source tracert issues a ping with the hop count set to 1. This packet passes through my_router but decreases the hop count by 1 as required of all routers. When the packet arrives at my_modem, the hop count is discarded, and a report is sent to the source. This iteration continues until 8.8.8.8 is reached.

Occasionally, you’ll see an entry with just asterisks listed instead of actual addresses. That simply means the intermediate router does not participate in responding to pings. 

Frost & Sullivan’s recent analysis, Global Network Access Control Market, Forecast to 2024, finds that the proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT), the convergence of information technology (IT) and operation technology (OT), and customers’ migration to the cloud at a faster pace are rapidly driving the NAC market. The sector is estimated to increase by two-thirds, reaching $2.21 billion by 2024 from $1.35 billion in 2019, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10.4 percent.

With 60.2 percent market share, North America will continue to be the largest market for NAC until 2024; APAC is the fastest-growing region and its share of the global NAC market is estimated to increase from 9.9 percent in 2019 to 11.9 percent in 2024. The COVID-19 pandemic will cause a severe slowdown in 2020. Thereafter, the NAC market is expected to regain annual double-digit growth rates as organizations settle into a “new normal.”

Related: Solutionz Launches SecureAV Cybersecurity Managed Service

“Security vendors are working closely with their customers in order to support them in this unprecedented transition to work from home (WFH),” said Tony Massimini, senior industry analyst at Frost & Sullivan. “They are focused on ensuring their clients’ business continuity, and the pandemic has underlined the value of cloud services in delivering and deploying security solutions to remote devices. However, the cloud environment needs security as well. Having a remote workforce highlights the need to leverage NAC. Large cybersecurity vendors with broad product portfolios will want to add this solution as well.”

Vendors should continue to innovate cloud security, work closely with AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and other tech vendors, and focus on virtual appliances and NAC as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Additionally, NAC is adapting to a more mobile environment as enterprises expand beyond the traditional secure walls. 

The complexity of 802.1X deployment (one of the best methods for authentication), surging diversity of IoT devices, and increasing NAC solution costs for large enterprises are likely to hinder the market. NAC vendors’ move to work beyond the traditional IT perimeter and innovation in other technologies will boost growth opportunities via:

• Incorporating NAC into OT to improve security tools for better coordination and to leverage IoT technology.
• Focusing on virtual appliances and SaaS for customers’ quick migration to public and private clouds.
• Instrumentalizing the concept of zero trust networking (ZTN)—the never trust, always verify principle—so security vendors, including NAC, can promote their capabilities via integration of their product portfolios.
• Capitalizing on use cases of IoT, BYOD, and mobility, which are increasing at a significant rate. Most IoT devices do not have the resources to handle an agent, so agentless technology is required.

Global Network Access Control Market, Forecast to 2024 is the latest addition to Frost & Sullivan’s Information and Communications Technology research and analyses available through the Frost & Sullivan Leadership Council, which helps organizations identify a continuous flow of growth opportunities to succeed in an unpredictable future.

When we began this series, we discussed the ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol). This protocol is the basis for two widely used applications, ping and traceroute. In this lesson and the next, we will review the protocol and delve into how ping and traceroute work and how they can be used effectively.

[Byte-Sized Lesson: Analyzing Netflix’s Streaming Delivery]

ICMP is not an optional protocol in TCP/IP. In virtually every operating system, if IP is used, ICMP is a mandatory extension. As the name implies, ICMP sends and receives control messages related to how IP is functioning. For example, if a message is sent to a nonexistent IP address, it will be ICMP that reports back to the source that the address does not exist. If a packet is sent to a device in a network that can’t be reached with the existing routing structure, ICMP will send a message indicating that the network can’t be reached. It may also suggest a new route to be used.

ICMP messages rarely consume a lot of bandwidth. In fact, if they do, that is often a sign of a malware attack. Unfortunately, some applications and operating systems use discovery processes designed to see which devices are currently active on the network. Such processes usually involve pinging every possible address in the network to see which devices respond. Better discovery routines ping only a list of potential devices such as those that are using a particular application such as email or a collaboration product.

[Byte-Sized Lesson: How Layers Affect Protocols]

The most common type of ICMP responses are either error messages or what might be called reachability messages. If there is a problem with an IP packet’s route or destination, the following are some of the error codes that can be returned:

• Hop count exceeded: packet went through too many routers and has been discarded.
• Destination unreachable indicating what can’t be reached among the following: Host, Network, or Port.

Reachability messages are:

• Echo request and reply, commonly known as ping
• Redirect: used when the router knows a better path for the sender to use.

In our next lesson we’ll examine the use of ICMP with the most common applications ping and traceroute. However, before we leave this discussion, we’ll point out how Windows 10 reports a ping response. On my computer, in the command window, I typed ping 8.8.8.8. The response was this:

• Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes 32 time 27ms TTL=55
• Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes 32 time 27ms TTL=55
• Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes 32 time 27ms TTL=55
• Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes 32 time 27ms TTL=55

TTL (time-to-live) is the original name for what is commonly called hop count. Each router a packet passes through is a hop. From these four replies, we know we can reach the server and the response time is about 27ms. In addition, we can probably assume the default hop count for Windows was set at 64. Since each router decreases the hop count by 1, we can determine that the route to the server involved seven hops. I verified the default hop for Windows 10 by sending a ping to my own router and the response said TTL = 64. My local router is zero hops away.

In our next lesson, we’ll review ping and move on to the use of tracreroute. The combination of these two applications can reveal a surprising amount of information about our network and network application performance.

It isn’t news to anyone that AV and IT are converging. The writing has been on the wall for over a decade, and for valid reasons: IP-based AV solutions are less expensive to deploy, easier to manage, and far more flexible and scalable than the legacy point-to-point systems that preceded them—full stop.

[Audinate Releases Major Update to Dante Domain Manager]

Initially, AV-over-IP deployments kept AV and IT departments operating in separate spheres, continuing the practices that had accumulated over decades. AV departments would deploy their own closed networks, not wishing to involve the IT staff and not quite understanding how AV over IP might affect the networks as a whole. This meant while AV over IP was growing in use, it wasn’t yet engaging the managed networks that form the backbone of so many enterprises, and was thus still “invisible” to IT. If there was a problem, IT couldn’t see or help it.

Much has changed. Today, IT departments are given the charge of deploying and maintaining AV-over-IP systems as part of critical business infrastructure. AV experts are still key, as no one expects IT managers to suddenly become versed in microphone placement, room equalization, video calibration, and so forth. IT needs tools that help them to support AV teams and maintain network functionality from end to end, as the simple AV-over-IP networks of yesterday give way to fully managed, fully visible systems.

What AV Should IT See?

Teams work best when each group has clearly defined concerns. IT is concerned about network functionality and health, and not about the AV-specific details of any particular device such as a microphone, speaker, or DSP. What IT needs to oversee are precisely the parameters and events exclusively related to device security and connectivity over the network, so that AV can depend upon the system to work reliably.

• IP addressing: Are all devices assigned correct addresses for their subnet?
• Subnets: What devices are members of each subnet?
• Clocking: Are PTP masters/grandmasters and slaves reporting normal multicast operation in each subnet?
• Groupings: Are devices assigned to the correct groups (domains) as defined by AV?
• User permissions: Are the right people assigned to each AV domain to manage devices?
• Devices: Are there any new devices that need to be placed into domains? Are there any devices missing from a domain?

Notably missing from this list is specific channel assignments and connections. If the network is working from the IT perspective, then individual channel subscriptions are easily managed by AV staff doing their jobs using regular configuration tools that do not alter the network behavior. 

What Can Be Managed, and by Whom?

The scenario described above provides IT with a “high-level” view of the AV network from a perspective of basic health and security. IT takes on the responsibility for defining device domains (groupings) and setting user permissions in conjunction with AV, ensuring that external devices such as switches are configured and verified to work. Setups such as these are likely to remain static for lengthy periods of time, in contrast to the day-to-day adjustments made by AV staff. 

If IT has a high-level view through a domain manager tool, then AV needs low-level tools to manage specific devices and connections. The IT manager probably doesn’t know or care if a particular DSP is set to provide echo cancellation, but AV staff certainly do. Likewise, a member of the AV staff may connect devices in a domain for a temporary event without altering any of the grouping and security functions that concern IT. This means tools are required that can “see” the domain at that granular level.

Those tools include configuration software for specific devices that don’t affect network connectivity, such as DSP and mixer settings. They also include network configuration software that works only at the domain level, allowing connections between member devices to be changed without altering the network outside the domain.

Security Inside and Out

IT in business settings is naturally concerned with breaches that come from without—a nefarious actor attempting to obtain files or get into an email system. AV is more concerned with maintaining a working configuration, which often translates into reducing risks from within.

External threats are best handled with managed firewalls and good employee practices, such as spotting and avoiding phishing attempts. Internal threats are more likely the result of user error, resulting in misconfigured connections and devices. AV tools need to match IT expectations regarding user access and permissions, so that the system can match the actual people and skills required to run it without requiring IT intervention.

An AV domain manager provides this level of service, coordinating with existing user directory services to identify users and assign permissions. With an AV domain manager in place, AV users are required to authenticate themselves before any changes to network routing or changes can be made. Audits are maintained so that mistakes can be reviewed and corrected, while dashboard and email alerts keep IT and AV managers aware of any changes that may negatively impact the AV system.

The organizational functions of an AV domain manager are helpful here as well. When users only have to observe a small set of devices that are part of a single domain, they are less likely to make mistakes that are common when looking at very large, visually confusing grids of devices and connections. An AV domain manager makes the system easier and more reliable for everyone involved.

Who Does Which Parts of Security?

In multi-vendor systems, no single system can view all parameters. While an AV domain manager can observe and control the network connectivity, the settings on individual devices are left to tools made by those individual manufacturers. 

This aligns well with the different jobs of IT and AV. IT is concerned primarily with the AV domain manager level of control, ensuring that the right people are able to use the network for AV and that it will work. The members of the AV team are the people who truly understand how to configure AV devices, and need access to those local controls on a regular basis.

With coordination, a coherent networked AV solution and the right tools, IT and AV can work together to create multi-vendor systems that allow everyone to do their best work with the lowest chances for error. 

Brad Price is the senior product marketing manager at Audinate.

In the lesson for this month we are going to do an analysis of a popular streaming service. Our goal is to better understand how we can use a traditional IT tool to do a deep analysis of this type of video flow. We will learn techniques that are widely applicable to troubleshooting and to analyzing other types of audio and video flows.

We’ve chosen to use Netflix as an example of a streaming service. Netflix has recently passed $1 billion in revenue and represents extremely high amounts of IP traffic on the internet. Like Apple HLS and Microsoft Smooth Streaming, Netflix generally uses variations of adaptive bit rate (ABR) delivery. The transport method is very different from other video flows such as conferencing video, SRT, or SDVoE.  

It is interesting to understand how Wireshark, a free IT tool, can help in our analysis. Wireshark has been used for decades with traditional data applications. However, here, our focus is on its use with video. In the example discussed here, the internet connection is DSL with a downstream/upstream bandwidth of 20/2Mbps. The target playout device is a Windows 10 computer running Chrome to access the video. In order to capture the Netflix flow, the stream is passed through an Ethernet switch and the analysis device running Wireshark is attached to a mirror port.

Using a feature of Wireshark called conversations, we can obtain a table such as that shown in Figure 1. By inspecting the various tabs at the top and clicking on column headings to sort the entries in the column, we can see the TCP sessions that deliver the video to the client computer at 192.168.7.116. The first three sessions dominate, delivering about 44 MB. If we right click on the first row of that table, the traffic for that TCP session is separated and shown. 

Then, using the I/O graph function of Wireshark, Figure 2 results. This illustrates the bandwidth used by the single TCP session sent to port 50926 (listed in the first row of Figure 1). In the first 23 seconds, the video source uses most of the available 20Mb bandwidth to attempt to saturate the playout buffer. Then, at varying intervals of approximately 5-10 seconds, the playout buffer is refreshed with much smaller deliveries of video. If we were to repeat this procedure on the sessions described in line 2 and 3 of Figure 1, we would see almost identical graphs. By starting three simultaneous sessions to deliver the first burst, Netflix can overcome one of the problems posed by the TCP algorithm. A single session would be handicapped by the latency of the connection.

So, what can we conclude from this evidence? First, the deliveries use TCP, which indicates that it is under the control of the TCP algorithm. Decreasing the bandwidth will lengthen the time needed to deliver the first saturation burst and all succeeding bursts. Second, the length of this burst will be subject to the amount of traffic on the upstream path, which delivers the acknowledgements of the delivered packets. The presence of competing traffic or high network loss rates will also lengthen each burst. If these bursts use too much time and the playout buffer empties, the video will pause. This will probably increase the likelihood that the source will switch to a lower resolution. Such interference will also increase latency in the delivery.

Note that changing the playout device, its operating system or its browser, or the type of internet connection will change the results you will see. However, at the very least, we have seen an example of video delivery that is much different than what we would see if we analyzed IPTV, conferencing video, or video types such as SRT. 

The What: Netgear has released a line of high-power Unmanaged Gigabit Ethernet 24-port PoE+ Switches with the company’s PoE Power Auto-Balance and Allocation technology.

The What Else: The Netgear GS324P 24-port Gigabit Ethernet Unmanaged PoE+ Switch provides 190W PoE budget across and 16 ports PoE+ with an additional eight non-PoE ports. The new GS324PP 24-port Gigabit Ethernet Unmanaged High-power PoE+ Switch has a 380W PoE power budget across all 24 ports to connect to your existing core network. 

[How Netgear is Working to Drive the AV-over-IP Revolution]

Netgear’s PoE Power Auto-Balance and Allocation PoE technology automatically balances the PoE power allocated to each port based on the device needs independent of PoE class detected, enabling optimal power allocation and energy efficiency across PoE ports. These models deliver the power the device needs, at the most granular level, allowing for more powered devices to be connected (vs. standard, class-only unmanaged PoE switches).

“With the growth of PoE products on the market, Netgear is keeping step with demand by developing more switches to address the growing market needs,” said Richard Jonker, vice president of SMB product management for Netgear. “We are happy to deliver the first high-power unmanaged gigabit Ethernet 24-Port PoE+ switches on the market with PoE Power Auto-Balance and Allocation.”

The Bottom Line: These new members of the Unmanaged Switch family enable deployment of PoE+ ports exactly where they are needed. Additionally, the compact design makes the switches well suited for any business environment. The GS324PP and GS324P come with the same features of all Netgear plug-and-play Unmanaged 300 series Switches, including robust construction, easy monitoring, and a standard three-year warranty.

The GS324PP and GS324P Gigabit Ethernet PoE+ unmanaged switches are now available worldwide for a manufacturer’s advertised price of $329.99 USD and $249.99 USD respectively. 

What is a network protocol? Most textbook writers state something like this: A network protocol is a set of guidelines or standards for the operation of network devices, the methods of operation, and the formats for transmitted data. But what criteria are essential to determine what is or is not included in a protocol? The layered model of communications can guide us. 

For example, why does RTP (real-time protocol) include a method of transferring a sequence number? Why does the error check in the IP header not include a validation of the data field in the packet? The answers to these questions depend on the layer with which the protocol is associated.

[Byte-Sized Lesson: Variations in IP Connectivity]

First, let’s review the idea of the layers as they are used today. The original model published in the early 1980s was the OSI model and it had seven layers. However, today, most discussions refer to the TCP/IP Protocol Suite model that has, listed from the top down, five layers: application, transport, network, data link, and physical. Let’s investigate a few protocols and the layer to which each is associated.

The TCP protocol is associated with layer four, the transport layer. According to the model, this layer is responsible for reliable transfer of data between the end-to-end processes. This is the reason that TCP tags the packets with a sequence number, has a retransmission method, and does flow control to prevent overflows of the receiving application. By contrast, the IP protocol, which is associated with the network layer (layer three) does not sequence packets, provide for retransmissions, or control the rate of flow. These functions are not part of the responsibilities spelled out for that layer in the model.

The data link layer (layer two) lists the functions that need to be facilitated to have reliable access to and delivery over a single physical link. This can be contrasted to the transport layer, where the same functions target reliability from end process to end process. At the data link layer, we see protocols such as 802.11n wireless, which deal with access to the air and retransmissions between the antennae.

So, let’s now return to the question of why RTP has sequence numbers. This protocol is nearly always used with Ethernet, IP, and UDP below it. Suppose that RTP is being used to transfer voice or audio over a network. The receiver needs to know when packets have been dropped. It may choose to simulate the voice or repeat the use of the last packet of voice in that case. However, none of the protocols below RTP makes provision for sequencing the packets. Consequently, this capability must be incorporated into the features of RTP. Likewise, IP is associated with the network layer and integrity of the data is not a listed responsibility. As a result, IP does not need to do an error check on that data.

Achieving AV goals such as reducing delay, maintaining reliability, and controlling accessibility depends upon which protocol provides these tasks. Additionally, these functions rely on the layer of the TCP/IP model to which they are associated.

Almost every AV manufacturer has spent the last few years hard at work on making their products mesh better with IT, but how many IT companies are working at their side of this relationship?

Netgear is one such networking company that sees the vast potential in pro AV, and it has gone to lengths of late to capture as much of the market as possible with solutions that “just work.” According to Laurent Masia, director of product line management, managed switches at Netgear, the company’s ambitions necessitated an organizational restructuring. 

“We went to InfoComm explaining that we made the decision to reshape the organization top down, from our CEO, from our general manager down to the expert sales, tech support organization, then operations and product people,” Masia said. “Altogether we are committing to helping this transition from HDBaseT to IP networks, and our way is to simplify that.”

To accomplish this, the company announced three new advanced Layer 3 switches that are preconfigured out of the box for AV over IP and multicasting. 

“We realized the hard way that AV over IP in general, but video multicasting in particular, deserve and require advanced switching,” Masia said. “Because it’s meant to be super robust, super stable, and you have a whole lot of interoperability potential issues when it comes to a job with video and Dante and AES67.”

AV and IT must collaborate for successful IP network convergence

M4300 Series

The M4300 series is a 40G, 10G, and 1G stackable platform with nonstop forwarding. Available in sizes from eight to 96 ports, these switches feature “zero-touch” configuration designed to make integration with SDVoE networks as simple as plug and play, with no need for programming.

1Gb vs. 10Gb Ethernet: Which is right for your AV network?

Noteworthy individual models in this line include the M4300-16X, a 16-port switch with PoE+; the M4300-24XF, which features 24 fiber ports; and the M4300-48XF, which packs 48 fiber ports into a 1U chassis.

“This new platform fits with a new vertical, which is healthcare,” Masia said. “Because healthcare and hospitals worldwide are based on fiber, all the time. Copper, the good old RJ45, is not really allowed for certification. So, our AV manufacturers that are very active in healthcare were in the need of a cost-effective, full-fiber solution.”

To further help customers simplify the transition to AV over IP, the new switches will incorporate a new software enhancement currently known as IGMP+ that will enable them to run on Layer 2 at scale. 

Moving forward with the adoption of AV over IP

“The problem with Layer 3 is that it adds a level of complexity,” Masia said. “It’s a long and fastidious configuration prone to mistakes, and customers don’t want that. They need a high-end platform in order to have a robust-enough switching platform, but [one that doesn’t] leverage Layer 3. So, we fixed the Layer 2 part instead, in order to offer the same scalability to do large installations but without fastidious configuration.”

Dedicated Pro AV Engineering Services

Rounding out the company’s latest push is its Dedicated Pro AV Engineering Services, conceived to empower businesses with free network design assistance and installation support. From pre-sales and post-sales support to technical training, to white papers and best practices, these services are positioned to help educate tech managers and integrators to become masters of networked AV.

“It’s a design center with networking professionals capable of documenting, drawing, and producing architectures and explaining the configuration, publishing the configurations, and assisting during installations,” Masia said. “And when the shit hits the fan, those network professionals fix things, because you can’t miss a delivery date. This is a fundamentally different behavior and we’re really happy with it.”

The basics of AV over IP infrastructure

Adding together its new products, software, and services, Netgear seems poised to capitalize on its mission of becoming the number-one networking partner for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

“Netgear’s ambition is not only to stay, but become the absolute leader in SMB networking and our ambition has not changed,” Masia said. “We are on the market to simplify and streamline IP networking for small and medium customers who don’t have the resources, don’t have the budget, or don’t have the right IT teams to leverage more complex or prestige networking equipment. 

“We made the decision to reshape our organization to address the needs of the AV industry and the community of end users and systems integrators, and for AV manufacturers. We made the decision this year, and said ‘OK, our solutions work, but this industry deserves more. They deserve a real partnership.’”

When networks are used to deliver multimedia, timing becomes an issue. As IP networks were developed and deployed for data applications, timing seemed to be somewhat unimportant. Getting data to the destination and preserving its integrity was paramount. That concept began to change when IP started to transport voice (VoIP). Suddenly, we became concerned about pauses between speakers that would cause the participants to feel uncomfortable. Now, there are a variety of ways we manage timing with IP transported information.

One of the earliest techniques was to use the Network Time Protocol (NTP), which focused on internet data traffic. After several revisions to the protocol, it could boast an accuracy among a group of devices that was within a few milliseconds. This was seen in an unfavorable light by the industry that was delivering voice (telecommunications) or video (broadcasters), since they were using leased connections or satellite transmission.

[Byte-Sized Lesson: Troubleshooting Study]

In VoIP, timing is nearly always based on the Real-time Protocol (RTP). It’s also the primary technique used in audio or videoconferencing. In RTP, each source is identified by a code. It is called either the synchronization source or a contributing source. Each of these sources provides a time stamp that is placed in the RTP header. In other words, the clock for an RTP transmission is based on the source of the audio or video. The primary purpose of this time stamp is to help the receiver with the exact time the data is to be presented (played) to the listener or viewer. Normally, network devices such as switches and routers will not tamper with the time stamp; the sender simply creates it and the receiver uses it. Voice and conferencing commonly use UDP at layer four. UDP does not provide for a time stamp. That’s why RTP is needed.

When TCP is used for transport, such as in adaptive bit-rate video, the layer-four protocol is TCP. There is a provision for a time stamp to be inserted in the TCP header. However, both the sender and receiver must negotiate its use during session establishment—that is, during the three-way handshake. This time stamp has become more prevalent as networks have more delay than in the past. Yet, its use in a session is dependent on whether the TCP software in each station can support it. In addition, the application software requesting the creation of the session must include a request for it to be used.

One of the most popular mechanisms to transport audio or video is the MPEG transport stream format (MPTS). In this packet arrangement, audio and video samples are 188 bytes long and an IP packet generally carries seven of these. Each of these samples carries a Presentation Time Stamp (PTS). So, if an MPTS stream is carrying a video signal and two audio signals, the IP packets will contain a PTS values corresponding to each of the three sources. Each sample will have a PTS indicating the clock by which the sounds and video can be remixed into a synchronized output stream for the viewer.

The choice of the timing method seems to be based, to a great extent, on the segment of the industry that develops the products that will stream the audio or video. There is an engineering concern as well. Some of these methods are more accurate than others. Finally, we should mention that the issue of synchronizing a group of output devices is based on a common clock has not been considered here. What we have focused on in this article is the synchronization between one sender and one receiver.

The AV industry is constantly talking about the relationship with the IT department. Will they accept our new technology? Will we get support when we need it? Should our AV traffic be on their network? How can AV and IT collaborate for for successful IP network convergence?

In this feature, we’ll review the concerns and involvement each of the AV and IT departments and provide a technical basis for the difference in their views. Finally, after reviewing a little history of the development of IP technologies, we’ll see if there isn’t a lesson to be learned from experiences. Perhaps we'll find ways to turn AV over IP challenges into opportunities.

IT Concerns

Initially, the information technology department first used IP to deliver data to and from business applications and to do messaging (email). Then, web browsing became the main application. While many transport protocols were available, essentially only two were used: TCP and UDP. TCP carried the bulk of the data between clients and servers, and email and browsing were based on TCP. The general feeling was that UDP would be reserved for control messages and voice. The main department concern was with the network’s bandwidth utilization.

What you need to know about AV over IP

For our purposes in this discussion, we’ll identify voice as a form of audio. Voice and videoconferencing were not originally based on IP; the switch to IP began around 2000 and used UDP exclusively for transport. Suddenly, loss on the network became an IT concern. Losing two successive packets or more in a voice stream caused clicking sounds or silence. When IPTV was introduced, the loss issue became even more critical to IT because the video deteriorated severely with low levels of loss. Dropped packets caused blocks of distortion on the screen, which was called tiling. Video could be delivered on IP networks but was first done with progressive download, and then by a variation developed by Adobe known as Flash. Such video delivery was based on TCP and became the first form of AV technology that could dynamically compete with the existing business flows—that is, the traffic level would rise and fall as bandwidth was available. With this new video traffic, the concern with the network was twofold: how much will it compete with existing traffic and how much delay will lost packets introduce?

AV Concerns

During the latter part of this interval, the AV industry made several advancements in the delivery of video on IP networks. Today, the concerns they express center on latency and the composition of the video. Arguments between competing vendors revolve around issues such as the chroma subsampling method (4:2:0, 4:2:2, or 4:4:4) or the latency from glass to glass. The term “zero latency,” later corrected to zero-frame latency, became a method of showing distinction in a product. Once HD and 4K video became the expected resolution, the network issue of bandwidth came to the forefront. Some vendors claimed 1G Ethernet was sufficient. Others said 10G was necessary. Even the issue of whether the video and audio should be multiplexed in the stream has become debatable, with MPEG advocates going one way and SMPTE backers going another way in their 2110 standards.

The AV industry also noticed that basic Ethernet was missing a key feature: the ability to carry a timestamp that is accurate to the microsecond level. This led to the development of Dante and AVB. AVB was implemented at layer 2, the data link layer. So, its advocates touted that it was an extension of standard Ethernet just like VLANS. The Dante advocates claimed that AVB required special switches. The AVB camp countered that licensing wasn’t required.

[Building Synergy Between Campus AV and IT Departments]

Miscommunications

Now that we’ve analyzed the concerns expressed by the AV and IT groups, we come to an important conclusion: What is important to AV is often not significant to IT professionals. Similarly, the main concerns of IT managers seem to be overlooked by the AV community.

Let’s look at some specific examples. Ethernet switches have been part of IT since the mid-1980s. However, they have appeared as a necessity for AV networks in just the last few years. For decades, the IT department’s concern was with the management of these switches and the software used to do that management. Cisco and other IT vendors have developed certifications based on knowledge of these management skills. IT staff members also ask if the switch supports VLANs and whether it has fast path adaptation when a link goes down. 

Latency is an issue for IT. However, they are questioning if it affects the throughput of TCP applications. Network time is rarely important except for device control. The AV industry focuses on the possibility that the master clock can be carried across the switched network. It is highly unlikely that IT has ever heard of Audinate, developer of Dante, which adds such capability. Additionally, they also are likely unaware that there is an IEEE standard for AVB in spite of the fact that most Ethernet-related standards were ratified by that organization.

One other area where there is a distinct difference is how they monitor networks and conduct problem diagnosis. The IT industry has several popular tools to assess packet content, bandwidth, flow characteristics, and other network health parameters. They include software from Viavi, Netscout, Wireshark, and tools from Cisco. The AV industry, meanwhile, has little to compare with these. A few AV products identify source and destination addresses, port numbers, bandwidth used, loss, and a few other parameters; however, there is nothing that allows in-depth analysis such as the dozens of diagrams, performance charts, and actual packet decoding available in the IT products.

Lessons from History

Have you ever wondered if IT is near to dominating the AV industry? We’ve seen some signs that they may be closer than they appear to be. Consider the following: About 2005, the PC was just getting momentum, but the mainframe still did the serious business computing for the company. Companies had a telecom department that ran the telephone system called the PBX, which didn’t use IP. The head of that department was the telecom manager. The leading two vendors were Nortel and Avaya, the latter of which was a spin-off of Lucent, which was a spin-off of AT&T. Then, company named Selsius demonstrated that voice could be successfully implemented over an IP network, and they were acquired by Cisco in 2008. Within five years, Cisco dominated the voice industry, most telecom departments fell under IT, and the telecom manager was unemployed or moved to different position. Today Nortel doesn’t exist, and Avaya’s market position has dropped considerably.

The story in videoconferencing was similar. A decade or so ago, Polycom was the leading vendor and didn’t use IP. Cisco entered this part of the market by purchasing Tanberg and switching to IP systems. By 2015, the telepresence market was dominated by Cisco and Polycom saw its share of sales dwindle.

Keeping your converged IP network secure

Lessons Learned

What is to be learned from these events? Consider the fact that Cisco now has four lines of switch products that support AVB: the 3650, 3850, 9300, and 9500 models. Biamp has tested these and assures customers that the Tesira line of products are fully compatible with these switches. Is this a sign of Cisco’s seriousness about playing a major role in the AV market? Keep in mind two features we have made in this article: One, Cisco can quickly dominate a segment of the industry and they bring the IT department with them, and two, Competing proprietary approaches seem to lose in the struggle against Cisco choices.

The reason for this vast difference in concerns seems to be evident. IP network convergence requires that AV pros gain IT networking skills. On the other hand, IT staff have been slow to understand the differences in audio and video types and the critical performance parameters that separate good delivery from poor delivery. Audio and video aren’t easy to learn. Nor are IP networks and network performance easy to master. The challenge is whether we can cross-train each other to meet the needs of our companies and customers.

Ten years ago, AV and IT departments on college campuses remained distinct entities, rarely if ever having a need to work together. But with trends including IP network convergence, AV over IP, BYOD, wireless classrooms, and more collaborative and interactive learning environment, IT is present in classrooms in a way it has never been before.

With this blending of two distinct disciplines that now find themselves married, there are bound to be some hiccups along the way. With the bandwidth AV takes up on the IT network, there will be inevitable tensions between the two departments. Here, we're profiling two AV departments that demonstrate successful interdepartmental relationships with their respective IT departments.

Modern Classrooms Reflect Enterprise Trends

Tristan Cary, director of technical services at Wentworth Institute of Technology (WIT), said that although he’s been at WIT more than seven years, there are still some challenges. WIT has around 4,500 students and provides each with a laptop when they start classes. The laptop program creates a modern and interactive classroom experience where multiple users are expected to project material or work in collaborative groups simultaneously. But creating these mediated classrooms is always a challenge for the AV team. With a team of two technicians and a handful of student workers, they are responsible for over 100 mediated classrooms, six auditoria or large meeting places, and dozens of conference rooms and breakout spaces.

At Columbia University Medical Center, Jonathan Kornberg, director of instructional technology, and his team serve eight buildings, 50-plus rooms, and auditoria and amphitheaters. With 10 years in his role, Jonathan was able to anticipate the early stages of a move toward AVIT in his space and was proactive in planning for it alongside his IT team. That early planning has paid dividends later.

Kornberg said the merging of AV and IT at Columbia has exploded over last five to 10 years. He started preparing several years ago by gradually adding new switches of 1Gb or higher to accommodate the AV devices. Because beamforming, QOS and opening ports are moving quickly, these new access points are a necessity. Kornberg works to create understanding for his networking team of how AV is changing and why their cooperation and insight is critical to success. 

AV over IP convergence: What you need to know

Kornberg admits it took a long time to get everyone on the same page, and for IT to fully understand why AV needed their own subnet and VLAN. But in time, as Kornberg patiently worked to educate the IT team, they eventually developed an understanding of AV’s needs. (In other words, AV and IT must collaborate for a successful IP network convergence.) Now everything is streamlined and easy, and issues are quickly resolved with a help ticket.

At WIT, Cary reported that getting the ball rolling on an AV project never seems to be a large challenge. He believes this is due in part to the luxury of having a technical-minded school interested in advancing pedagogy with technology. The biggest challenge at WIT is not an uncommon one: getting everyone to agree and come to terms with a solution. 

When working on something of great benefit to many, such as an AV-over-IP solution, it becomes clear to WIT’s technology services staff how vital it is to advance the work and keep classrooms online. Being able to diagnose a classroom instantly over the phone rather than having to walk across a campus creates more time for innovation, experimentation, project completion, and training users on new technologies. It brings the day-to-day work down to a minimum allowing more institutional knowledge to take place, and that’s a universal win for WIT.

Best Practice: Continually educate your IT department about the latest AV technologies so they can begin to understand how vital it is to work together for success. Get their advice and input on the front end about how best to ramp up for new technology.

Practical Ways to Enhance Understanding

Physical proximity of the two departments can go a long way toward encouraging education and understanding. At WIT, AV is housed within IT, ensuring constant communication. Having a network operations team sit right next door to the AV technicians allows them to see some of the challenges and pain points. Cary noted that typically IT staff are wired to find and solve challenges—so he leveraged that close proximity, solid teamwork, and collaboration to make AV problem solving more of a group effort. 

“We started doing daily five-minute standups with our network operations team just to catch up on any issues throughout the day,” Cary says. “That brought our Help Desk, Media Services, and Network teams into a more collaborative partnership where they had a voice in how issues could be addressed to move us toward a common goal.”

Similarly at Columbia, AV used to be part of IT, so there was a good understanding of what AV was doing. Sometimes, Kornberg said, IT will simply provision the switches and VLAN to expedite things. At other times, they don’t understand exactly what AV is doing, but there is a level of trust; for example, when AV has an OS running through IT’s security protocol. In boardrooms and digital signage projects, IT has a good understanding of what AV is trying to do and is able to jump right in to problem solve.

Improving AV device security on converged IP networks

Best Practice: Schedule a series of brief sessions where members of the AV and IT departments gather to discuss issues, so that you’re there together working through problems, installations, and upgrades. It encourages more frequent communication on important issues, and builds a level of trust with day-to-day interactions.

Communication Is Key

Cary explained that one of the best ways to ensure the WIT team is working toward the same goal is to clearly define direction. The media services team works closely with AV to plan those mediated classrooms, an upgrade schedule, and a defined budget for the year, all while allowing flexibility in the technologies inserted into those rooms. 

AV has a clearly defined direction and they all work closely on what projects will be tackled next. Once projects are prioritized, they work on creating a project team, getting stakeholders involved as early as possible, and ensuring that communication is taking place at each step of implementation. Setting an example is the best way to push forward teamwork and have other teams mimic that behavior, so Cary is conscious of trying to lead the charge when it comes to communication.

Columbia’s team meets several times a year to review plans and scope of projects. The team uses a ticketing system: when it’s time to provision things, IT assigns AV what they need. As an example, things were very streamlined and quick moving to Crestron XiO Cloud; everything was provisioned quickly, even the interface on the back end happened fast. 

Best Practice: Clearly define AV direction, projects and timelines, and then set up a mechanism to communicate that to all stakeholders, whether through short, frequent meetings or larger overviews. 

Issue Resolution Strategies that Work

Working through issues and resolutions is always a challenge. Cary works to mitigate problems by getting as many stakeholders involved as early in a process as possible. He brings together IT teams, facilities, deans, chairs, faculty, and any executives who want to be apprised of the next AV project. 

Embracing IT innovations for AV applications

WIT also relies heavily on its AV partner, AVI-Pro from Nashua, NH. Having an outside partner with knowledge and insight helps find the answers to the bigger challenges. Often, it means finding the real cause of the issue. Working together to find a solution can be challenging, but it’s also an exciting opportunity to show what teamwork can do.

At Columbia, there is a VLAN hotline so IT is able to switch things on the network right away—and it can be done remotely. AV shares the Columbia University hospital network, so AV has a provisioned autonomous VLAN so there is no crossover. There are cable pullers and network installers onsite, which Kornberg calls “a huge luxury.” All these factors contribute to very rapid response times. Kornberg makes sure to show appreciation to the IT team for their responsiveness.

Best Practice: Get stakeholders involved early to mitigate issues. When problems do arise, consider having an outside partner who can lend expertise. It’s also helpful to have a process and resources in place to get issues resolved quickly

Culture Matters

At WIT, Cary emphasizes a sense of inclusion within the department, showing everyone’s opinions are valued. If a conflict should arise, Cary personally sits down with the concerned parties and listens to their potential solutions. This culture where everyone’s opinion has value has created a safe place for people to discuss different issues that arise so that they can move forward as a team.

Kornberg also promotes a culture of strong interpersonal relationships and mutual support. Webinars together are one method that’s been particularly helpful. New people in the department take time to ramp up on the culture. A strong culture starts with the leadership, and Kornberg follows the ticketing protocols so things can be tracked just like the rest of the team.

Best Practice: Create a culture where people’s opinions are valued and team members support one another. Help new people to adapt to the culture, and lead by example.

Successful AV and IT interdepartmental synergy takes some time to develop, but will certainly be a necessity to keep campus environments moving forward. Strong communication, close physical and relational proximity, well-defined processes and a culture of inclusiveness are a few of the essential ingredients to make sure AV and IT solutions continue to play well together. When all these elements are in place, it might just be an amazing marriage after all.

Internet RFCs (Requests for Comments) are one of the most significant influences on the conduct of the internet, and more generally, on the use of the IP protocol. In the IT community, the role of RFCs is recognized. Unfortunately, the same is not true in the AV community. Recognizing the importance of RFCs would hasten the integration of IT and AV. This lesson focuses on where RFCs came from, what they are, and how they influence IP technology.

In 1969 the predecessor to the internet, the ARPANET, was operated in a casual manner by researchers and computer scientists at major universities. One engineer at UCLA, Steve Crocker, wrote RFC 1, which was titled “Host Software.” He didn’t intend this to be a rule or standard. Rather, he sought input on its contents. Very quickly, the number of published RFCs grew. Gradually, they took on the tone of strong suggestions or guidelines. To a greater extent, they became definitions of protocols and guides as to how protocols could be used. For example, in 1981, the IP protocol was prescribed in RFC 791 and the TCP protocol was prescribed in RFC 793. If you contemplate the plethora of internet acronyms such as ICMP, TSL, RIP, and HTTP, you will find one or more RFCs that give the details of the protocol. The number of RFCs is approaching 9,000.

[Byte-Sized Lesson in AV/IP: Packet Structures]

Today, in the IT community, a new protocol or method is not likely to be accepted unless it is proposed as an RFC. These new specifications are first submitted to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as drafts. They may or may not be placed on a standards track, which is the path to formal approval. However, sometimes manufacturers feel they can obtain the credibility they need by publishing an RFC as “informational.” 

While RFC documents are generally the guidelines that are used across the industry, there are some notable exceptions. This is especially true for audio and video transport. MPEG-DASH (Adaptive bitrate using HTTP) is specified in ISO/IEC 23009-1:2014. Yet, even here, RFCs 6983 and 7933 describe the use of DASH video in particular application scenarios. The IT community also treats the methods specified by certain major manufacturers such as Cisco and Microsoft as standards. These are referred to as de facto standards and are recognized as proprietary in nature. Within the AV industry, few de facto standards compete with the influence of the RFCs.

[Byte-Sized Lesson: How’s Your IT Lingo?]

Over the last several years, the Byte-Sized Lesson series has made an effort to inform you of the many methods and protocols used to deliver audio and video over IP networks. Nearly every IP related protocol we’ve covered has a corresponding RFC. A short list of audio/video RFCs includes 1890, 5334, 6416, and 4856. However, there are many more. With the growth of audio and video traffic on IP networks, the list will surely continue to grow.

Say “AV” in the same breath as “network security” among AV/IT professionals and you’re bound for a lively conversation. Securing AV devices on the network for AV over IP transmission is arguably one of the last major sticking points to true AV/IT convergence, and one that presents a number of challenges to tech managers striving to adhere to their organizations’ security policies. Is it because today’s AV gear doesn’t live up to IT security mandates? Is it because IT professionals don’t always understand the quirks of AV? Yes, and yes ... and a few maybes.

Segmenting Traffic

Jim Smith, CTS-D, director of technical and application development at Sound Control Technologies, a voice and video technology solutions provider headquartered in Norwalk, CT, noted that one significant issue is that port-scanning software is often configured to recognize devices such as computers, which run on operating systems like Windows or iOS, without taking AV devices into account. 

“The typical AV device does not have an operating system [and] doesn’t have any access vulnerability, but the active scanner will report that there’s a flaw in that device because it sees a port active that isn’t on the white list,” he explained. Predictably, the enterprise security team’s reaction is to either close or block that port, or remove the device from the network, necessitating an isolated network for AV devices, which “leads to other problems [related] to data sharing and content access.”

It also presents a chicken-or-the-egg-type scenario, according to Paul Zielie, an IT and AV systems engineer and consultant based in Dallas, TX. “I personally believe in isolated networks and segmenting off AV networks as a best practice, but it is not the responsibility of an isolated network to provide device-level security,” he said. “It’s the responsibility of the device to provide device-level security, and it is very rare for that to happen.”

AV over IP convergence: What you need to know

The Cloud and Passwords

Then there’s the cloud: while it provides organizations with a convenient, and in many cases, more cost-effective approach to enterprise IT, cloud-based AV solutions don’t always make following security policies easy. “Some of the more recent devices don’t even try to integrate with anything on the local-area network—they will communicate directly out to the cloud—and that has caused me some interesting discussions here,” said Stuart Mitchell, senior analyst in the IT/AV department at ECMWF—European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, a meteorological research and reporting institution based in Reading, England. Generally, enterprise networks require traffic to flow through firewalls and proxies before connecting to the internet, “and a lot of the equipment I’ve been playing with recently doesn’t work well in that environment. They assume connectivity directly out to their cloud configuration service, and so getting them connected to an appropriate location on a network in an appropriate way, in some cases, has been quite a struggle.” 

Passwords continue to be another challenge for AV/IT managers, since, as Smith points out, some AV equipment still won’t accommodate strong passwords or pass phrases. He also notes that some AV control and management solutions don’t make it easy for tech managers in environments where the security policy mandates frequent password changes: when someone changes a password, the interaction between the controller and target devices is often compromised. 

Keeping your converged IP network secure

Encrypting Traffic

All this said, AV tech developers are working toward improving the security of their solutions, according to Mathew Slack, enterprise AV service owner at CIBC, a global financial services institution headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. “A lot more manufacturers are embracing things like 802.1X encryption, and secure ways of communicating with devices like TLS and SSH,” he said. (However, he added that he’d like to see more documentation on how to implement the certificates required for 802.1x, as well as information on how to effectively manage large fleets of AV devices using this protocol.) Slack added that an increasing number of devices support Active Directory and remote monitoring, and SNMP and syslog are becoming more widely available. “That’s definitely helping a lot with improving the security posture of AV.”

Turning AV over IP challenges into opportunities

One area that requires some rethinking, Slack believes, is related to traffic flows; with a network-centric model, he argues that traditional AV system line drawings are becoming less important than Vision diagrams showing network traffic flows. “Essentially, every device is connecting with the network ports—we’re moving away from needing a lot of HDMI cables and SDI connections,” he said. With this in mind, he said it would help tech managers if system designers and integrators could provide drawings that illustrate all of the network-connected devices, and how they interact with one another. “[They should] show protocols and traffic flows so that the AV/IT teams on the enterprise side can use that to more easily implement these solutions.” 

Plan and Coordinate

Smith argues that improving AV device security on the network is very possible, but that it’s an exercise that requires a holistic approach. “There are network access tools that provide isolation and protection, but those have to be designed into the network,” he said. “If somebody wanted to put in an active firewall, or a border controller, or some other device that did network isolation and firewall mitigation, those can be put in.” It’s necessary, however, to account for this in the overall architecture, rather than patching in these features later on. “It’s this notion of taking an active role and making sure that the IT managers are aware of the limitations and intent.”

AV and IT must collaborate for successful IP network convergence

This requires solid communication with all AV/IT stakeholders in the earliest planning phases before a deployment. “Your solution portfolio, enterprise, and security architects should be involved before you even go to an integrator or a consultant to design a system,” Slack said. “Get them involved early and work with them to document how these systems are connected on the network. I’ve seen a lot of cases where the security and network architects get brought in very late, and it’s very difficult for them to get up to speed and provide an effective network solution that works for the AV system.

AV, IT and Security: What Can You Do?

With the AV industry slow to adopt an IT-centric approach to security, tech managers are left to strike the balance between providing their users with the technology required to move business forward while adhering to their organizations’ security policies. But when the tech in question doesn’t live up to these policies, what is a tech manager to do?

IP network convergence requires that AV pros gain IT networking skills

“The biggest ‘what you can do’ is to move the security discussion into the tender or the design phase,” said Paul Zielie, IT and AV systems engineer and consultant. “There is language that [you can apply in tender documents] that says that there will not be a sign-off to start building the system until the security criteria is agreed upon. Because what happens is nobody has that discussion: the customer assumes that the integrator and consultant have [built the system] to IT standards, it gets deployed, and they do a functional test for sign-off. Then six months later when an audit comes through, [there are problems] all over the place and the customer has to bear it. If there’s anything tech managers can do, it’s to front-load that security discussion, and to lay out into absolute measurable deliverables that can be confirmed as part of the sign-off and payment process.”

Carolyn Heinze is a freelance writer/editor. 

In the past we considered transport protocols such as RTP (Real-time Protocol), ABR (Adaptive Bit Rate), SDVoE (Software Defined Video over Ethernet), SRT (Secure Reliable Transport), QUIC (Quick Internet Connections) and the SMPTE 2110 series of standards. Like IPTV, all of these work over UDP except ABR, which uses TCP. 

In this lesson, we want to look at another offering that comes from Zixi called RIST (Reliable Internet Streaming Transport). Zixi isn’t the only company using this protocol. However, we were introduced to the protocol by that company.

RIST has a lot in common with the other UDP based protocols. It provides:

• Resiliency against packet loss by using selective retransmissions
• Low latency
• Secure transmission
• Active and ongoing development under the auspices of the Video Services Forum (VSF).

The description of the protocol we will show here is the method utilized by Zixi. This means it uses the core ideas of RIST but may include enhanced features that are not yet fully agreed upon by the VSF group, which is guiding its development.

Clearly, there are some positive features of RIST. It supports MPTS (MPEG Transport Stream) with or with out the use of RTP. That’s consistent with the method widely used in IPTV and digital signage. It also uses RTCP (Real Time Control Protocol), the sister protocol to RTP, which is used to report error levels and request retransmissions. Both protocols are based on standards and in widespread use. The Zixi implementation has strong video and network analytic tools to diagnose problems and monitor the health of the streams. Much of the detail about a stream and its compliance with standards are easier to learn than would be possible by using some alternative tools such as Wireshark. Loss, jitter, and other statistics required by TR-101 290 are reported by the management system. Security is obtained by using DTLS (Datagram Transport Layer Security) and provides both authentication and AES encryption.

One might view RIST as a compromise, which uses some from the best features of several industry methods. While it doesn’t have the wide acceptance that TCP-based adaptive bit rate has, it offers strong error resiliency and much lower latency. Support of MPTS means that transcoding streams to be carried by other systems is simpler than when a proprietary format was being used. Because it uses DTLS (RFC 6347), it should have wide acceptability within the IT community. The internet engineers seem to be having a problem finding a method to solve TCP’s current problems with congestion and network buffering. We can probably expect to see growth in the use of these UDP-based methods like Zixi is promoting, until these concerns are resolved.

We often use the terms switches, routers, and gateways when discussing IP networks. However, do you really know what characterizes each, and the ways in which they differ?

When TCP/IP networks were new, there were typical classroom definitions. Switches, originally called bridges, operate at layer two, the Ethernet level. Routers operate at layer three, the IP level. Gateways operate using information from layers four through seven. Today, these definitions seem coarse and are only partly accurate. Further, each of the devices often shares attributes of switching, routing, and packet inspection. Despite this, we can give a somewhat accurate description of each type of device.

A switch operates primarily based on layer-two information, namely the mac addresses of devices that are on attached networks. The main purpose of a switch is to move an Ethernet frame in one port and out a second port without modifying the frame in any form. A more capable switch might support VLANs, which segment devices into groups. This is done so that packet flow between the groups can be controlled. This function is described as routing between the VLANs. As we’ll discuss later, this isn’t quite the same as the typical method used by routers. Devices interconnected by switches never have active duplicate paths between them. This would allow for loops.

A router primarily learns the locations of networks relative to its input and output ports. Then, its main function is to relay packets based on destination IP addresses in the packets. A key distinction between this routing and VLAN routing is how network addresses are learned. Routers typically uses a dynamic routing protocol that continuously shares updates about the network topology. Routers routinely allow for duplicate paths between networks. This provides redundancy. However, one path is always designated as the preferred path. In order to route between VLANs, switches are almost always manually configured with the necessary network addresses.

Finally, the term gateway loosely refers to a device that relays a packet based on almost any field in the packet. It might use mac or IP addresses, layer-four port numbers, or subfields of the headers such as the code bits in the TCP header.

If we think of latency as a measure of efficiency, switches are generally the most efficient because their function is simple. Routers have more to do with each packet. Besides a route table lookup, they must run an error check, modify the hop count, recalculate the error check code, and more. Finally, gateways are most often the least efficient as they might need to do a deep packet inspection that requires substantially more processing.

Using these terms accurately will facilitate descriptions of network problems and can aid in proper design, troubleshooting, and network management.

Our industry seems to be constantly talking about latency. The SDVoE proponents claim latency that is less than one frame time, glass to glass. The SRT Alliance members report latency under 300ms. At the same time, users of adaptive bit rate (ABR) video typically experience latency of several seconds. We ought to ask, “Why can’t ABR video vendors reduce their latency?”

The answer is the consequence of several factors:

• ABR uses HTTP/TCP.
• ABR video is delivered in chunks.
• The internet routers have very large buffers that reduce throughput but increase latency.

Since ABR uses HTTP and TCP it can add several hundred milliseconds of latency. A TCP packet is usually called a segment in the IT industry. When such a segment in a stream is dropped by the network, the sender doesn’t retransmit it until the receiver requests that segment four times. If these requests for retransmission are in the back of the queue in large buffers, the retransmission can take several hundred milliseconds.

Because ABR video is delivered in chunks, it is really a series of small file transfers. Because delivery is based on TCP, each chunk is sent as aggressively as congestion and network load will allow. So, the chunks arrive in a bursty manner. This requires the receiver to have a buffer that can hold multiple chunks. If it didn’t do that, there might be periods in which the buffer emptied and there would be nothing to play out.

A chunk is usually 4 or 10 seconds of video. Let’s say the chunk is to play for 10 seconds at 4Mb/sec. Such a chunk is 40,000,000 bits or 5,000,000 bytes. IP video segments very often have about 1,400 bytes in them. So, the chunk is transmitted in about 3,600 segments (packets). However, modern internet routers often have buffers that can hold more than a chunk. So, if the retransmitted packet is in the back of an overloaded buffer, the receiver would need to deal with lost data or have quite a lot of video in the receive buffer. That’s the trade-off. The receiver needs to have a large buffer that introduces high latency or must occasionally play video in a degraded state.

These problems introduced by using TCP are the primary reason for the development of competing solutions like Google’s QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections) and SRT (Secure Reliable Transport). Both methods capture some of the positive attributes of HTTP/TCP transport but avoid the undesirable consequences. There has been a significant amount of research on the relationship between large network buffers and TCP’s problems. However, that same analysis has not been published about these two newer protocols. When that testing is done, we may find that they also have problems dealing with large buffers.

The last decade has seen enormous transformation in the IT operations, or “ops” world.

Increasing levels of automation have shifted the day-to-day work of ops personnel. The rise of cloud computing has given rise to increasingly complex hybrid IT environments—all of which come under the purview of ops.

Even more significantly, the relationship between the application development, or “appdev” world, and ops has itself undergone a transformation. Gone are the days of “throw it over the wall, it’s ops’ problem now,” as DevOps brings collaboration opportunities to both appdev and ops teams, which means that means that the day-to-day life of ops personnel has improved.

Previously, the lack of automation and visibility into the root causes of problems used to lead to reactive firefighting-style crisis management, as people from different divisions gathered in war rooms for stressful finger-pointing sessions.

Today, in contrast, the work of ops is very different, as is our expectation of the future. The confluence of automation, hybrid IT, DevOps—and the increasingly important role of artificial intelligence (AI)—has led to a clear vision of a world where ops is fully automated.

Turn the lights out in your data centers, folks—and welcome to NoOps.

The Vision of NoOps

The idea behind NoOps is simple: build a fully automated IT environment that is entirely abstracted from the underlying hardware infrastructure.

With NoOps, it doesn’t even matter where the hardware resides, as the entire software stack, from operating systems and hypervisors all the way to running applications, is entirely software-defined.

This notion of a “lights-out” data center (who needs lights if there aren’t any people?) has become a reality for certain companies, in particular, the web-scale firms like Google and Facebook who have intentionally built their hyper-scale data centers to follow NoOps principles.

The public cloud service providers (CSPs) like AWS and Microsoft Azure likewise follow largely NoOps principles internally, as they simply wouldn’t be able to staff enough people to manage such massive portfolios of data center real estate any other way. Automation-driven NoOps for web-scale companies like these is a must-have.

For the customers of the CSPs, however, it’s a different story. For smaller, cloud native companies, NoOps may very well be within reach. But for enterprises, NoOps is largely unrealistic.

The problem: there is more to the hybrid IT reality of large organizations than an easy-to-abstract CSP-based environment.

Hybrid IT includes multiple public cloud environments, as well as private clouds, on-premises virtualized environments, and legacy environments—or any combination thereof. In essence, hybrid IT is a management approach centered on a workload-centric and value-driven abstracted technology stack across all of these environments.

From the perspective of the workloads that run the applications that companies conduct their businesses on, the goal is to build and support a coherent abstraction across all of the technical complexities of the underlying infrastructure. But from the perspective of the ops team, keeping this underlying infrastructure up and running securely at peak performance is well out of the reach of NoOps.

‘NewOps,’ not NoOps

Instead of NoOps, what about NewOps? NewOps is really nothing more than a name for the fully modern approach to enterprise ops.

The NewOps vision is first and foremost cloud-first: meaning that for every IT purchasing decision, a cloud-based answer is the default. The only reason to make an on-premises purchase is if no cloud-based alternative is suitable.

NewOps is also proactive. Instead of reacting to issues, the ops team leverages AIOps (AI for operations) to extract predictive insights from vast quantities of operational data, thus uncovering root causes of issues, predicting future issues, and ideally, leveraging automation to mitigate such problems before they affect the business.

Thirdly, NewOps is collaborative. AIOps and other modern ops tools provide constant feedback to both appdev and ops personnel, thus empowering them to continually improve the work they do.

NewOps is also service-centric in the sense that AIOps delivers value as services the ops team leverages in their day-to-day work, either manually or via automation. For example, the service-centric AIOps solution from OpsRamp provides services for hybrid infrastructure monitoring, intelligent event management, alert correlation, and remediation.

Finally, NewOps is fully hybrid, where all cloud and on-premises environments are equal parts of the enterprise infrastructure story.

The Intellyx Take: Will NoOps Ever be Practical for the Enterprise?

For NoOps to be a reality in a modern enterprise ops environment, three things must be true: the environment should be largely homogeneous, changes at the infrastructure level should be rare, and most significantly, ops people should have nothing more to learn.

For anyone with even a passing familiarity with the reality of enterprise ops, none of these three characteristics is realistic. Heterogeneity is a fact of life, and an inherent part of the hybrid IT story. Changes are constant, and as organizations increasingly move to containers, environments will be more dynamic than ever.

The human side of this question, however, is the most telling: ops personnel—in reality, everyone within IT—must always be learning. In fact, continuous learning and improvement is a cornerstone of DevOps, as it is with all iterative approaches to appdev including Agile and Lean.

NoOps may be a pleasant fiction, a holy grail of sorts where the quest is more important than the reality. In contrast, NewOps, in all its dynamic, hybrid glory, is far more likely to be the reality for enterprise IT for many years to come.

Jason Bloomberg is principal analyst and president at Intellyx.

Technology is becoming more porous, seeping into every aspect of our waking lives. Even our sleep (or lack thereof) can be tracked and logged into a FitBit IoT dashboard. It’s Moore’s Law in the machine learning era.

Open-source, stackable technologies are democratizing innovation, though the big tech brands are still standards bearers. More devices are coming pre-baked with AI, networks are getting faster, and just about everything comes in an as-a-service model—but how will these broader IT trends shape the professional AV industry? To unpack this question, scan the CompTIA 2019 Industry Outlook, which contextualizes the dynamics shaping the $5 trillion global technology industry. While the CompTIA report does not address audiovisual systems specifically, it is clear how developments like ambient computing will influence AV and UCC designs and implementations.

2019 COMPTIA INDUSTRY OUTLOOK STUDY

CompTIA, the world’s largest trade association for the technology industry, conducts an annual state of the industry research study to provide insight and direction for those working in the business of technology. The 2019 findings suggest a marketplace on the threshold of profound change, while simultaneously searching for new business approaches. Here are 12 key trends explored in the study:

COMPTIA’S KEY TRENDS FOR 2019

1. Cloud, Edge Computing, and 5G Form the Modern Economic Infrastructure
2. IoT and AI Open New Possibilities in Ambient Computing
3. Distributed Technology Models Challenge Existing Structures
4. Stackable Technologies Supercharge Digitization Efforts
5. Business of Emerging Technology Prompts Sales Channels Reinvention
6. Hyper-personalization Takes Customer Experience to Next Level
7. Partnerships Bridge Gaps in New Tech Ecosystem
8. Persistent Tech-Worker Shortages Fuel New, Creative Solutions
9. Digital-Human Models Begin to Shape the Workplace of Tomorrow
10. Technology Professionals Take the Lead in Anticipating Unintended Consequences
11. High Tech Increasingly Transforms Low Tech
12. Global Tech Hubs Put Spotlight on the Ingredients for Innovation
(Courtesy of CompTIA—www.comptia.org/resources/it-industry-trends-analysis)

Jim Hamilton, CompTIA’s vice president of member communities, is excited what the 2019 Industry Outlook suggests for business growth. “Think about the development of the steam engine or the combustion engine, and how electricity and water contributed to the industrial revolution. Now we have the cloud, edge, and 5G—ingredients that will contribute to the next industrial revolution,” he said. “It makes for a fertile environment for innovation and for businesses to thrive.”

CREATIVE SYNTHESIS

While “the next big thing” usually makes headlines, Hamilton said the current technological landscape is more about the adjacent possibilities that “come from the maturity of tech, the various advances in different sectors, and how you can tie it all together. It’s about the ability to build strategic solutions and leveraging different pieces.”

AMBIENT COMPUTING

One of the key trends featured in the CompTIA report is how IoT and AI are opening new possibilities in ambient computing. With smart lights, for example, users can access and control lighting via apps. Automation took smart lighting to the next level. Add to that AI and IoT, and smart lights will soon automate themselves. This is the promise of ambient computing.

Similarly, rooms will start to “learn” and respond to user behaviors and patterns. With ambient computing, the whole room will become an immersive, intuitive technology experience that extends far beyond the need for touchpanels.

“Ambient computing will use AI and algorithms to learn your age, your occupation, when you’re in and out of the house, and all of the things that are pertinent to the experience at home and work,” Hamilton said. To that end, systems integrators, tech managers, and room designers will need to think more critically about people’s behavior, consider new interfaces, and safeguard against negative side effects.

What’s more, as rooms become smarter and technology becomes less intrusive, users are demanding the flexibility to collaborate everywhere, via any interface. To specify solutions that can complement the “always on,” increasingly ambient culture, explore how soft codecs, remote participant support, and integrated audio can help organizations stay nimble and grow.

MONITORING AV LIKE IT

IoT, AI, and other emerging technologies permeated Integrated Systems Europe 2019 in Amsterdam. But no trend was as popular as AV over IP and the integration of “IT-friendly” features. Phil Marechal, VP business development and product management, Yamaha Unified Communications, sees the benefit of the AV industry embracing both IT-related concepts and IT-based technologies.

“There are a number of IT-based technologies that are starting to become popular, and AV is working toward understanding and building best practices around them,” he said. One example is the proliferation of networked AV, including IPTV and real-time AV over IP. While there are many approaches, including AVB/TSN, Dante AV, and AES67, more time-sensitive networking technologies are increasingly specified for AV deployments where scalability is required.

He added that, at Yamaha, the team considered various IT-based technologies for some of its new products. The CS-700, for example, features a networking technology called SNMP, a network management protocol that is common in switches and large deployments. SNMP lets users create different thresholds for alarms, and it will automatically notify a network center that a condition is occurring in a piece of equipment that may need to be addressed. In other words, it is a type of proactive monitoring. “Ours is the only audio/video soundbar technology designed for huddle rooms that has SNMP nibs built right into it,” Marechal said. “You can have 10,000 of these all over the world and constantly monitor them in the background like you might monitor a router, switch, or another critical piece of IT infrastructure.” With more IT-centric deployments, Marechal believes AV stakeholders will be better positioned to ensure reliable performance quality of service.

But to unlock the potential of IT-friendly AV, organizations large and small must diversify their talent pools. “AV is certainly understanding the impact of IT,” Marechal said. “Some integrators are starting to build practices right inside their organizations, hiring networking professionals to provide additional value-added services for configuring networks and understanding how networks need to be designed to support video protocols and audio protocols.” Myriad manufacturers offer IT-related training modules. AVIXA, ZeeVee, Matrox, Kramer, and others provide AV-over-IP certification courses.

PROACTIVE SECURITY TO SUPPORT AV

As more AV content and feeds become digitized, ultimately moving onto the enterprise or campus network, technology managers must be just as proactive about security as their IT counterparts. The new era of cybersecurity will benefit from needs assessment, enhanced firewalls, robust software to detect security threats, strategic vulnerability audits, and security analytics.

In his role as enterprise strategic business consultant, Midco, Andrew Simmons is strategic about security. Midco (Midcontinent Communications) works with large organizations, partnering with their IT leadership on delivering IT products and services to meet their ever-growing bandwidth and technology needs. Midco is one of the leading network and technology services providers in the Midwest, with an expansive, independently owned fiber network throughout the region. The firm delivers internet, network services, and data center services to communities large and small, both inside and outside of its footprint.

From his day-to-day work in the field, Simmons observes that “in virtually every industry, IT professionals are fighting to stay ahead amid the rapidly evolving data security threat landscape. Network and security departments are making continuous improvements to their network design and data centers to help combat this constant threat.” He added that when tech managers need to protect data with enhanced firewalls and anti-virus software, “it’s even more critical that you have fast, reliable, and diverse network connectivity to support your AV and IT initiatives.”

One method of staying proactive, according to Simmons, is to move away from a single, centrally located data center to a multiple-location approach. This allows organizations to be better prepared to respond to and recover from security threats, natural disasters, and equipment failure.

FACING THE FUTURE

What is clear from the CompTIA report is that IT trends encompass more than the technical infrastructure. The interplay of technology and the evolving economic climate is contributing to what many consider the “fourth industrial revolution.” The cloud, edge computing, the ability to process data quickly from any source, boosted by lightning-fast 5G, and security threats all present challenges and opportunities as we march into the brave new world. UX will become more important as IoT and AI help design powerful experiences at work and home. While traditional integrators and managers may specify less hardware, they will need to be more creative about the models and methods of delivering exceptional outcomes.

Margot Douaihy is a writer, storyteller, and frequent contributor to Systems Contractor News and AV Technology.

Info

AVIXA NETWORKED TECHNOLOGY TRAINING
https://www.avixa.org/training-certification/training/networking-technology

COMPTIA INDUSTRY OUTLOOK 2019
https://www.comptia.org/resources/it-industry-trends-analysis

KRAMER AV OVER IP CERTIFICATION
https://www.kramerav.com/us/academy/certification/av-over-ip

MIDCO: NEED FOR DATA SECURITY GROWS
https://business.midco.com/insight-center/2018/11/need-for-data-security-grows-as-healthcare-threats-rise/

ZEEVEE AV OVER IP WHITEPAPER
https://www.zeevee.com/av-over-ip-whitepaper/

More AV devices are ported for IP. More feeds are migrating to the enterprise network. More AV systems are software-driven. Convergence is a done deal, right? Not quite. There are still growing pains when it comes to deploying AV at scale. While audiovisual technologies are still the “magic”—from mesmerizing 4K to immersive audio—applying IT acumen in the planning stage will help build efficiencies, no matter where you are in the AV/IT conversation.

WHAT DO IT MANAGERS WANT?

All content, all access, all of the time—this is the mantra of Millennials, the dominant contingent of today’s workforce. Gen Z, born approximately between 1995 and 2005, will demand even more bandwidth and the latest tech tools at work. Expect more video-driven communications to support the pervasive meeting culture. Video and connectivity need to be “everywhere,” even outside, explained Tim Maffei, senior director of IT at EVERFI, a fast-growing edtech software company. “That’s where relying on a traditional conference phone, a big TV, or projector won’t cut it.”

According to a study from Gartner Research on Millennials and technology, “Millennials are more likely to use higher-end technologies in their personal lives, so it’s no surprise that they have a more positive view of IT strategies that encourage the use of personal devices at work.”

The demand for uber-connected, latest-and-greatest personal tech applies to AV as well, and IT directors need to support it all. “Some employees want lav mics and wireless handhelds. The next thing you know, you are scaling up, tech wise,” Maffei said. At EVERFI, the computer—once the central tool of the workday—UCC, and other AV technologies all “fall under IT,” he said, and it can be hard to distinguish between IT and AV.

While some observe the separation of AV and IT teams and workflows, Maffei is “experiencing the opposite: pro AV being a required service from IT as a result of the proliferation of videoconferencing and UCC.”

Whatever codecs are chosen by IT directors, they have to be easy for all staff members to use. While it might seem like an obvious point, keeping the end user in mind will save time and service hours in the long run. The same rule applies for AV.

LEVERAGING THE EXPANSION OF IT PRODUCTS, CLOUD

As Sam Recine, sales director, Americas and Asia Pacific at Matrox, sees it: “The number-one thing being attached to existing AV infrastructures already in place is high-quality, low-bitrate encoders. It’s hundreds of millions of dollars of hardware and software from hundreds of different manufacturers.”

He explained that the area of converged infrastructure is the one where end users themselves have (often) leapt ahead of AV service companies. AV companies are still too suggestible to the traditional AV hardware suppliers and they have not sufficiently leveraged the expansion of IT products, broadcast products, and cloud services. “It can be tough for an AV company when it shows up with a high-bandwidth, high-cost, proprietary hardware approach to a problem, and the end customer knows about 30 different ways to solve the same problems using approaches that are far more scalable and help enable new applications.”

Case in point: “Matrox was at ISE 2019, and we had our VP of R&D running an AV-over-IP interoperability demo from multiple different manufacturers in the AIMS booth,” Recine said. “We also had AV-over-IP, IP-KVM, and IP Video Wall products on demo in our booth and in dozens of our OEM partners, using different brands. But the hottest item (most leads) from the show was our cloud recorder that mates with the Panopto Enterprise Video Management Cloud Platform. This is for lecture capture and other enterprise communications applications.” Creating libraries of content is a value to originators of content such as universities, large corporations, and the ilk. Services like Panopto create a private YouTube-like interface for intelligently searching through thousands of hours of curated content assets.

FAST CONFIGURATION

One perennial issue with IT teams is that there’s no downtime. If an AV system is too cumbersome, requires too many manual updates, or it locks a facility into a siloed system, chances are it won’t make the final equipment list. That’s why companies like Harman, QSC, Utelogy, Crestron, and others collaborate with IT vendors to create interoperable paths between AV and soft-codec solutions. For example, at ISE, Biamp announced that its Tesira conferencing solutions are now certified for use with Hangouts Meet hardware, meaning that its digital signal processing (DSP) will work easily with Google. The company also introduced a deployment tool that streamlines configuration.

ACKNOWLEDGING STRENGTHS

The Biamp and Google example underscores the need for synergies. This transcends the hardware and software discussion, too. At the fundamental level, IT professionals bring value to an organization because they understand data. They know what it means to manage Internet Protocol-type data, how to assign ports, how to lock them down for security, how to manage bandwidth, and how to allocate in a software-defined way. These are concepts that are relatively new to AV teams. Where AV professionals still have the edge, according to Recine, “is in the expertise in acoustics, aesthetics, user interface design, and personalization of applications for target use cases.”

AV professionals hold insights about what people may bring into a room and try to connect, how people might behave with an interface, and what exists already in terms of management by AV processors. Optimization is important; there are myriad drivers that exist from Crestron, Extron, and AMX by Harman that are not as familiar to the IT teams as the AV professionals. Sharing knowledge and best practices will make deployments of any scale more efficient.

“The best outcomes are the ones where IT people and AV people recognize each other’s strengths and leverage those strengths, and that’s not a subordinate-type thing,” Recine said.

REMOTE MANAGEMENT

The demand is growing for software-based AV systems that give managers centralized control and robust remote access. BenQ’s MDA (Multiple Display Administrator) software, for example, simultaneously and remotely manages multiple displays via LAN or RS-232, which can save managers time on adjusting individual units via remote monitoring, scheduling, email alerts, and on/off control from a single location. Cloud-based automatic firmware updates will feed every display in the network the latest patches. Kramer Control is another cloud-based control and management solution that lets IT/AV managers deploy, control, monitor, and support AV systems, infrastructures, and any third-party devices. It is scalable and has no single point of failure.

Similarly, at ISE, Harman announced an alliance and product offering between AMX and Zoom Video Communications. Available now, two new solutions integrate the AMX Acendo Core Collaboration System and the Zoom Meetings service, as well as AMX Modero G5 Control Panels and the Zoom Rooms Controller app. Crestron’s XiO Cloud lets AV pros remotely update millions of devices in the same time it takes to update one, and implement security fixes in minutes. XiO Cloud also lets tech managers audit logs of every change from the cloud for more efficient diagnostics.

KEEP LEARNING

One of the reasons traditional AV integrators may not have adopted IT best practices is a matter of education; they may not have realized pertinent resources are available. More manufacturers are hoping to bridge this gap by offering IT skills training and encouraging the recruitment of new types of talent into AV firms—from networking experts to cybersecurity leaders.

There’s another reason to stay responsive to IT trends and nurture IT relationships, according to Joe Andrulis, executive vice president, corporate development, Biamp. “Pro AV is moving to the network, and if you don’t have a great relationship with the IT department that controls it, your odds of winning big enterprise pro AV sales are in serious danger.”

Recine believes that work groups can be given the tools to collaborate together and take advantage of specialized skills; it is a powerful way to assimilate knowledge. “It’s like what our students hear in school,” he said. “The best thing you can learn is how to learn, because you’re going to be learning for the rest of your life.”

Margot Douaihy is a writer, storyteller, and frequent contributor to Systems Contractor News and AV Technology.

Info

BENQ
benq.com

EVERFI
everfi.com

BIAMP
biamp.com

GARTNER RESEARCH: “MILLENNIAL DIGITAL WORKERS REALLY DO DIFFER FROM THEIR ELDERS”
gartner.com

MATROX
matrox.com/graphics/AV_Tech

At ISE (Stand 1-F20) Kramer Electronics will demonstrate its approach to IT-oriented pro AV, showcasing its software-centric ecosystem, management solutions, meeting space automation, elevated audio and connectivity solutions, and more. What unites Kramer’s robust product lines and new initiatives is the company’s strategy of AV over IT. ISE 2019 highlights will include:

Kramer Platforms

Kramer Platforms is a new concept that aims to go beyond standard “convergence.” Debuting at ISE 2019, Kramer Platforms consist of hardware devices that are software-driven, so one box serves multiple functions—with the goal of leading AV designs with software and maximizing return on investment and customization options. With Kramer Platforms, AV professionals can combine solutions such as Kramer’s VIA collaboration system with a Kramer Control brain. 

Kramer Control

On display at ISE will be next-generation Kramer Control, a code-free, cloud-based control platform. Kramer Control enables increased agility, allowing users to more quickly and cost effectively deploy control in any space.

Kramer Network

Kramer Network 3.0, an enterprise management platform enabling IT/AV professionals to configure and manage their entire Kramer product range, Dante devices, and third-party devices from anywhere in the world. Kramer’s approach considers not only IT specifications, but also IT work methodologies, letting managers plan and deploy IT and AV systems in the same streamlined manner. This platform is engineered for the IT manager.

UX Flash Track 

A positive user experience is essential for the reliable operation of an AV system, and Kramer is investing heavily in sharing UX best practices in the AV industry. At ISE, the company will discuss how UX is a catalyst for new technologies.

AVIXA Flash Track: “User Experience: The New Catalyst for Technology,” with David Margolin, VP Marketing, Kramer. 

Date/Time: Thursday, February 7, 1:30 p.m.

Location: Room N110, Hall 13 

More Info 

SCHOMS: Focus on BYOD

Committed to supporting technology managers and end users, Kramer is partnering with SCHOMS for a hosted buyer program focused on BYOD and collaboration. SCHOMS members lead and manage a diverse set of educational, technological, media, and institutional development and support services.

“The use of huddle spaces has grown over the past few years and the ability to stream content from BYOD is a key factor in their growth,” said Neta Lempert, VP business development, digital, Kramer Electronics. “As we reach a maturity of the huddle space concept, what is next and how should we prepare for it?”

Kramer Academy

Kramer Academy—led by leaders in the field—provides tools, skills training, and deep dives into core topics and fundamentals that IT and AV professionals need to know for the new era of AV over IT.

At ISE 2019, Kramer Academy courses at ISE will include AV over IP and Kramer Control, on February 6 and 7. Earning AVIXA CTS RU points, attendees can register here. 

Network Security Panel

This panel on network security will feature Kramer’s network and control expert, Keren Lipshitz. 

Date/Time: Friday, February 8, 3:00–4:00 p.m.

Location: Main Stage. 

AV Nation’s Tim Albright will moderate the session. 

Community Events

Kramer will host a German Hosted Buyer Program and its annual cocktail party at the Kramer stand 1-F20 (by invitation), on February 6, at 4:30 p.m.

8K Whitepaper

Kramer’s resource library continues to grow with the addition of a new 8K whitepaper. This paper explores 8K “glass” and related challenges for transporting, switching, distributing, and interfacing 8K signals, due to their high clock and data rates. Download the whitepaper here. https://k.kramerav.com/academy/white-papers.asp.

In past lessons, we discussed some important numbers used in IP networks. One was 1460, the standard maximum application payload of a typical packet. The second was 1518, the maximum size of Ethernet frames. In this lesson, we will investigate important numbers that appear in the transport of audio.

218

If you put a packet sniffer on a voice network, you might notice that very often, audio packets contain 218 bytes. This results from a default setting for voice: VoIP was developed from the standards of the telecommunication industry where the G.711 codec was commonly used. In the packet, each of two samples of 10ms of voice is encoded into 80 bytes. To the 160 bytes of voice, 58 bytes of Ethernet, IP, UDP, and RTP are added, making the total 218 bytes. These packets are sent 50 times per second.

PORT NUMBERS

In the audio industry, many different IP structures are used. Most often, audio is transferred using UDP with an industry-standard format for the actual audio data. In these cases, the key numbers are the source and destination ports in the UDP portion of the packet. The port number identifies the application code that is to send or receive the audio. Sometimes it is fixed by a standard. Other times it is negotiated during the session establishment. Or, it may be determined by the vendor when they develop the system software.

Why is this port number important? Occasionally it needs to be known to allow the audio traffic to pass through firewalls. This is one of the reasons you might hear the IT network staff talking about opening a port on the firewall. This port number is extremely useful in troubleshooting problems with audio on the network. For example, if you are having intermittent problems with audio transfer, you can put a protocol analyzer, such as Wireshark, on the network and set it to capture only traffic to and from the port(s) that are being used for that audio traffic. By doing this, you’ll be able to see only that traffic and know if frames are dropped, misrouted, or sent in a bursty manner.

Here are a few examples of how these port numbers are used in audio. The Clear-Com Eclipse 9.1 HX Software on a system with an IVC-32 card or E-IPA card communicates to external devices using 6001 as the default TCP or UDP ports. This configuration is designed to be deployed over the LAN, WAN, or the internet. However, that value can be set by the user to any valid port number to accommodate routing needs. The Helixnet partyline system, which is intended for LAN use, utilizes UDP port 5353 for mDNS discovery, UDP port 6001 for audio, and TCP port 6000 for pairing such devices as remote speakers and belt packs. mDNS is a discovery technique similar to the way a hosts file is used in Windows to replace DNS. However, ports in this configuration are fixed and cannot be changed by the system administrator.

With the knowledge above, we can put a packet sniffer on our network and capture traffic that is isolated to the function for which these ports are used. This may allow us to see such traffic for a period of weeks and months rather than for a few minutes or hours.

Yamaha Unified Communications will showcase its broad offering of unified communication solutions at SpiceWorld 2018, Oct. 8-10 at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas. The unified communications (UC) company will feature its new YVC-200 speakerphone for portable, on-the-go conferencing, the Yamaha YAI-1 Conference Ensemble for large conference rooms and boardrooms, and the CS-700 Video Sound Bar for huddle rooms.

"The scope of meeting environments has changed significantly. Now IT professionals are burdened with finding a UC portfolio with solutions that will accommodate huddle rooms and traveling executives as well as high-end boardrooms without sacrificing audio, IT capabilities, installation efficiencies, or ease of use," said Timothy Mackie, field systems engineer at Yamaha UC. "At SpiceWorld, we'll help IT professionals understand their meeting space requirements and demonstrate the right equipment for the job so they can be the unsung heroes of their companies."

Making its IT debut, the YVC-200 portable USB + Bluetooth speakerphone is designed to provide users with ample, clear sound no matter where they work. The lightweight device is available in white or black, fits in the palm of the user's hand, and is integrated with Yamaha's leading sound processing technologies, including adaptive echo cancellation and Human Voice Activity Detection that focuses the unit on speech, rather than background noise. The unit's intelligent microphones deliver full-duplex conversation without sound dropouts, even when multiple people are speaking at once, and its powerful speaker delivers audio that sounds as natural as in-person conversation. It's fully compatible with remote conferencing systems such as Microsoft Skype for Business, Cisco WebEx, Zoom, and more. To start a remote meeting, users simply connect the YVC-200 to their audio, video, or web conferencing client. Equipped with USB, Bluetooth, and fast pairing to NFC-enabled devices, the YVC-200 can connect to a PC, smartphone, or tablet.

Enabling maximum installation and configuration efficiencies for large meeting spaces and IT personnel, the Yamaha YAI-1 Conference Ensemble is a preconfigured USB audio system that achieves optimum audio in and out for any chosen UC platform. The ready-to-install system comprises an eight-channel Executive Elite wireless microphone package, two VXL1-16 PoE speaker arrays, a preconfigured digital signal processor, a five-port PoE switch, a Dante AVIO USB adapter, and cabling. Once set up, the Yamaha YAI-1 Conference Ensemble is ready to connect through a single USB cable. Ensuring that every participant can hear and be heard clearly, the bundle includes two 16-element PoE-powered line array speakers that deliver high-quality audio throughout the room and a wireless microphone system that enables flexible, superior audio capture and stress-free conversation. The system is available in two microphone options: an eight-gooseneck microphone package for boardrooms, or seven table-top microphones and one wearable microphone for presentation flexibility in conference rooms.

Also being displayed at the show, the Yamaha CS-700 Video Sound Collaboration System for huddle rooms optimizes audio, video, and collaboration capabilities to ensure the highest-quality user experience in a wall-mounted unit. The all-in-one, space-saving system is easy to install and deploy. It features an adaptive beamforming microphone array for perfectly captured conversation; four Yamaha speaker elements to provide the highest degree of audio intelligibility; and a wide-angle HD camera for the far-end participants to see everyone in clear detail. Users can quickly connect to an organization's chosen UC platform — such as Microsoft Skype for Business, GoToConference, Zoom, and many others — using a single USB connection, eliminating the frustrations and inefficiencies of operating disparate video, audio, and collaboration components. In addition, the CS-700's integrated network management system allows IT staff to deploy and remotely manage each unit from one location, increasing service response and efficiency.

Netrix has achieved Microsoft’s Gold Competency in Data and Analytics by helping customers adopt and consume Microsoft Data Analytics solutions, with Microsoft Power BI and Azure Data Services.

To achieve Microsoft competencies, a partner must pass a plural of certification requirements and submit customer references on recent services completed. This is the sixth Microsoft Gold Competency that Netrix has attained.

“We are very excited to gain another Gold Microsoft Competency in such a growing and developing area,” said Don Penland, partner, Netrix. “Our team has been working with customers to understand how to transform their data platforms to ingest, model, analyze and then visualize their data in new ways with Microsoft cloud solutions.”

Netrix provides data analytics project work using Microsoft Azure Data services and Microsoft PowerBI. By combining these tools, Netrix is able to provide customers with the business intelligence (BI) insights that they need.

The achievement of Microsoft’s Gold Competency in Data and Analytics further strengthens Netrix’s recently announced Netrix DnA service, which offers managed service data and analytics for small and midsize customers. Netrix DnA provides businesses with actionable data insights using Microsoft cloud solutions.

Audiovisual solution providers have increased hiring of professionals with IT skills to address broader client requirements and handle technologies based on network architectures, according to the 2018 META: Pro AV Channel Employment Report produced by AVIXA, the Audiovisual and Integrated Experience Association. The research is the latest in AVIXA's series of Macro-Economic Trends Analysis (META) reports.

Based on analysis of five years' worth of hiring data, as well as occupation codes defined by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the most sought-after workers by AV integrators are audio and video equipment technicians and computer user support specialists. From 2015 to 2017 the number of computer user support specialist job openings at AV integrators tripled.

According to AVIXA's analysis, other IT-related jobs in demand by AV integrators, although not at the same level of computer user support specialists, include computer programmers, IT project managers, and network and computer systems administrators.

"The growing prevalence of IT occupations at AV firms demonstrates that integration companies are expanding their capabilities and further blurring the lines between AV and IT," said Sean Wargo, senior director of market intelligence, AVIXA. "It's getting harder to say a company is absolutely an AV or an IT integration firm. By some measures, nearly one-third of the open technology positions at AV integration firms are IT-related."

The 2018 META: Pro AV Channel Employment Report represents an expansion of prior years' Compensation and Benefits Reports and now covers a wider set of employment issues at AV integration firms. AVIXA researchers began the 2018 study by identifying 50 of the top pro AV integration firms and used that reference list to analyze job data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and Emsi (a labor market analytics firm). In addition, AVIXA conducted a survey of AV integrators to gain an in-depth understanding of the current state of compensation and benefits at their firms.

From 2012 to 2017, audio and video equipment technicians (in 2018, changed to audio and video technicians), as defined by the BLS, were the largest, single group of workers sought by AV integrators, representing 21 percent of job openings in 2017. Computer user support specialists, as defined by the BLS, represented 12 percent of job openings at AV integration firms in 2017. Employers categorize their employees using BLS codes and job descriptions. Taken together, the two job categories made up roughly one-third of all posted job openings at AV integration firms from 2012 to 2017.

In analyzing all job openings at AV integration firms, those characterized as IT-related currently outnumber those related to sales.

"The surge in IT occupations in the AV channel reflects adoption of in-demand products and solutions," Wargo said. "According to our Industry Outlook and Trends Analysis report, streaming media, storage, and distribution platforms generated $17 billion in revenue in 2016 and now account for nearly 30 percent of the North American pro-AV market. This solution set includes substantial amounts of pro-AV-specific IT equipment, in the form of media servers and systems that run specialist AV software but are, at their heart, standard IT hardware."

Overall, across all employer types, not just AV integrators, the number of audio and video equipment technicians in the U.S. workforce, as defined by the BLS, has grown 34 percent from 2012 to 2017. The total number of computer user support specialists across all employer types has increased 17 percent.

The BLS also gathers salary information. Across all types of employers, the median 2017 salary for audio and video equipment technicians was $42,190; the median salary for computer user support specialists was $50,210.

According to data from the report's compensation and benefits survey of AV integration firms, as opposed to data from the BLS and Emsi, the median compensation for non-specialized technicians (install technician I), is in-line with BLS/Emsi data, at $40,000. Install technician I compensation has risen at an annualized rate of 1.3 percent since 2008.

Based on direct feedback from AV firms, the 2018 META: Pro AV Channel Employment Report tracks total compensation for 37 specific positions, including install technician I, II, and III; engineering manager; project manager; director of sales; and CEO. According to the data, across all senior management positions, total compensation continues to rise at an annualized rate of approximately 2.5 percent. Engineering manager and project manager job titles saw strong, nearly 4 percent annualized gains over the past 10 years.

AV over IP has definitely arrived as a prime distribution platform for AV content. The proof: According to Futuresource Consulting, AV-over-IP encoder/decoder sales were up more than 130 percent in 2017, compared to the year before. A big jump in sales corresponds to a big jump in AV-over-IP installations.

“This is a game changer for the industry and its impact cannot be overstated,” said Anthony Brennan, research analyst at Futuresource Consulting.

Meanwhile, the amount of AV content being carried over IP networks keeps growing. At the rate things are going, “It would take an individual more than 5 million years to watch the amount of video that will cross global IP networks each month in 2021,” according to the Cisco Visual Networking Index: Forecast and Methodology, 2016–2021 report (published 2017). “Every second, a million minutes of video content will cross the network by 2021.”

For AV managers today, moving AV content onto their internal IP networks appears to be an irresistible trend. Even without the push by AV equipment vendors to support IP-based distribution systems, adopting AV over IP allows managers to resolve distance-based signal degradation, switching complexity, and other limits associated with traditional AV distribution systems.

This said, moving AV signals onto an enterprise’s IT infrastructure is not simply a matter of exchanging one form of carriage (traditional, AV-only networks) for another (IP networks). The reason is that IP networks were never designed to carry uninterrupted linear AV content. Instead, the IP standard was optimized to move data files without too much regard for network slowdowns and latency issues. This is because the end user didn’t need access to these files until the download was complete.

The fact that AV over IP requires the transmitted signal to be accessible and usable throughout the entire transmission—especially when the AV content is being broadcast in real time for live viewing—imposes a requirement that traditional data applications didn’t have. Given this fact, there are a number of issues that AV managers wishing to move to IT-based content delivery need to address to make this transition successfully.

KEEP AV ON ITS OWN IP NETWORK

The experts interviewed for this article agree: Whether virtual or physical, AV content should be moved over its own IP network, rather than mixed in with non-AV content on the main enterprise network. “In many of the integrations involving our ZyPer4K products, AV operates on a dedicated network so that bandwidth and security is not compromised,” said Art Weeks, ZeeVee’s product manager for IP products.

There are many reasons to keep AV content separate from non-AV content. First, keeping the two apart eliminates the issue of prioritizing one form of traffic over the other—especially if the shared network is also being used to carry Voice-over-IP (VoIP) telephone calls that cannot tolerate any degree of latency or signal dropout.

Second, keeping AV segregated from non-AV traffic is a good security move. “Many of the AV-over-IP connection boxes are just simple Linux devices that can be relatively easy to hack,” said Phil Hippensteel, assistant professor of information science at Penn State University. “Having these boxes connected directly into your main IP network could make highly sensitive corporate data vulnerable.”

Security issues related to AV content depend on the specific application. “For instance, security may not be an issue in a sports bar, where it would likely be a concern in a corporate environment,” Weeks said. Nevertheless, “the security of the AV network itself is not the issue. The real issue is that you do not want AV aspects of the network used by outsiders to gain access to the non-AV portion of the network.”

A third reason to keep AV separate from non-AV traffic is to prevent AV content from devouring the available bandwidth on a shared network. This can be a problem with networks that use the Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) on IPv4 networks to multicast to numerous users.

“What happens with IGMP is the switch isn’t intelligent enough to know what its limits are when streaming AV content,” said Chris Fitzsimmons, a product manager with Biamp Systems. “Should the stream exceed the available bandwidth, we’ll start to see packets of data tossed over the side.”

This issue can be averted by using Audio Video Bridging over Ethernet (AVB)-based streaming instead, which reserves 25 percent of available bandwidth for non-streaming traffic, Fitzsimmons said. But again, a simpler solution is to have AV content on a separate network (virtual or physical) instead.

CHOOSE TCP OR UDP, DEPENDING ON YOUR NEEDS

One important detail to remember with IP networks is that the standards that dictate how data should be packaged and prioritized—the transport protocols—are definitely not one-size-fits-all solutions. Instead, each transport protocol has pros and cons, in line with how it moves data across the network and what priorities it addresses.

For AV content transmission, two common options are Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and User Datagram Protocol (UDP).

If you select TCP, “then your AV stream will grab all the bandwidth it can grab; even it if maxes out the network,” Hippensteel said. “If you select UDP, then the amount of bandwidth dedicated to your AV stream will remain constant. The good news is that this will keep the network from being maxed out. The bad news is that if the UDP’s bandwidth has not been configured to provide sufficient capacity for the AV stream, the signal may stutter and/or degrade in resolution.”

KEEP AV IN A SINGLE DOMAIN

When it comes to IP traffic, the domain name of the content is akin to the address of a house. This is usually a word—i.e. Google.com—that is associated with a numerical IP address or addresses that internet routers use to connect a computer to that network location.

Since a domain can support more than one IP address, it makes sense to keep things simple by having one domain for users accessing AV content. But that’s not the only reason to keep things simple: “As a general rule, you want to keep all AV-related products on a single domain as control is difficult to maintain over multiple domains,” Weeks said.

GET THE RIGHT CODEC

A codec (coder/decoder) is the key piece of software that encodes and then decodes AV content for transport and viewing over an IP network.

Like the transport protocols, there is no universal solution when it comes to choosing the right codec. “It all depends on the use case,” Fitzsimmons said. “Are you doing digital signage that draws on recorded content, or a keynote speech that needs real-time delivery with minimal latency? Your use case will determine which codec is right for you; ask your IT support person if you’re not sure.”

THE BOTTOM LINE

Moving AV over IP is not just a case of switching copper AV cables for Ethernet cables. Make sure to do your homework—and to work closely with your IT department—before making any purchasing decisions.

(Note: For a quick primer on AV over IP, check Matrox’s “Fundamentals of AV over IP” webpage at http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/press/guides/av-over-ip-fundamentals/)

Considerations for Moving AV over IP

• Keeping AV traffic separate from non-AV traffic (either on a virtual or physical network) minimizes traffic jams and reduces security risks.
• Know what content you want to move, and how it will be used (e.g. live broadcasts versus digital signage) before choosing codecs and transport protocols.
• Your transport protocol of choice (TCP or UDP) depends on what you what your AV content to do, and how it will be consumed.
• Moving to IP is complex; get help!
• Buy-in from your IT department from the outset maximizes your chances for success, and peaceful coexistence.

The What: Evolute, creator of scalable cloud migration and container technology, debuted its software platform for enterprises. Evolute is designed to enable large IT departments to quickly and reliably migrate and run software applications between computing environments up to 10 times faster than virtualization solutions, at a fraction of the cost, improving how companies do business. Evolute also announced it was chosen to join Chevron Technology Ventures’ Catalyst Program, which is designed to support early-stage technology companies innovating in smart oil fields, advanced materials and other core software and systems technology.

The What Else: Due to the rise in the complexity of applications, processing, and network interface issues, virtualization has proven to be costly and time intensive, limiting the portability of applications between various clouds within an IT organization. As a result, enterprises are turning to the container industry in record numbers, with analyst estimates reaching up to $2.7 billion in market size by 2020. Evolute’s container platform can rapidly scale, minimizing the complexity and cost of cloud and virtualization technology. By shortening implementation and leveraging its speed, Evolute reduces organizational downtime and enables enterprises to achieve new capabilities in their infrastructure. This allows enterprises to recover time spent performing maintenance to achieve continuous operations measured at up to $1 million per hour in savings.

“We are honored to work with Chevron as a part of CTV’s Catalyst program,” said Kristopher Francisco, CEO and founder of Evolute. “Large enterprises need a lightweight, less costly and scalable environment that can allow applications to move between clouds and closest to the places in which they compute. Evolute is uniquely positioned to impact the energy landscape with its ability to quickly and easily bring large scale business, engineering, and even petrotechnical workloads to the latest generation of cloud capabilities. As a result, this industry-first solution is poised to help large enterprises achieve their goals at a rate which improves their core capabilities at a much reduced cost.”

The Bottom Line: Evolute enables Fortune 500 companies in the high tech, banking and energy industries to innovate in their cloud and edge environments. With this focus, the Evolute team is partnering with leading technology providers and customers to optimize how enterprises use container technology and improve business efficiency.

The What: At InfoComm 2018, LG Electronics USA Business Solutions announced the addition of new Thin Client and Zero Client solutions to its portfolio of commercial monitors on display. LG’s new cloud solutions aim to bring added convenience, enhanced connectivity and security, as well as cost efficiency to the IT industry.

The What Else: LG’s new suite of cloud monitor solutions, including Zero Client and Thin Client displays are designed with the IT professional in mind. LG’s Zero Client reimagines computing by providing a centralized network management system that enables easy maintenance and streamlines operations. These units are designed to provide uncompromised display quality and up to five times faster performance than previous models. Unlike traditional monitors, LG Zero Client models provide built-in security with PC-over-IP (PCoIP), which internally manages software updates and greatly reduces the risk of virus, spyware, and hacking because all data and memory are stored in the central data center. The monitors are connected over the corporate LAN cable, which also acts as a power supply. These features allow for a simplistic setup. The only things required to get started on their LG Zero Client monitors are the keyboard and a mouse.

“As secure data transfer increasingly becomes a focal point in the IT industry, LG has expanded its highly acclaimed commercial desktop monitor portfolio to include state-of-the-art client monitor and cloud solutions,” said Stephen K. Hu, head of commercial monitors, LG Electronics USA Business Solutions. “With seamless connectivity, highly secure cloud computing solutions, and displays with incredible picture quality, LG’s broad portfolio of monitors is designed to meet the evolving needs of end users in a variety of industries.”

The Bottom Line: LG Cloud Monitor system utilizes a Teradici PCoIP processor and Amazon WorkSpaces to deliver a powerful and secure virtual solution that broadens integrated computing beyond design labs to offices and classrooms. The Zero Client virtualization software enables a single server to support more monitors than previously possible. With no central processing unit or operating system, PCoIP Zero Clients greatly reduce the risk of viruses, spyware, and hacking—making them well suited for security-critical organizations.

Don’t miss a social beat – follow #MyInfoComm2018 and make sure you visit Crestron located in the Central Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center at booth C2562.

Truly Converged AV over IP

Since we’ve been reporting on AV over IP, there’s been an asterisk. Or more like a hammer from IT directors declaring “not on my network!” Enterprise networks are carefully guarded, as they should be.

The AV industry has spent a lot of time discussing latency and compatibly issues of networked AV, then preaching how AV folks need to become IT experts. Yet you could say we’ve only pontificated about AV/IT convergence.

Until now, AV over IP products were designed as digital iterations of analog products with matrix switchers and other devices requiring customized programming to communicate on a network. Because many AV over IP products are complex and bring with them too many variables such as bandwidth-choking video—as well as potential security holes—the easier and safer route has been to create an ‘AV network.’

Is it really networked AV when it can’t live on the enterprise network? Most would say no. Many IT directors would say they don’t care, as long as it wasn’t on their network.

If …

What if AV solutions were developed so they needed to live on a standard 1-Gig Ethernet enterprise network, and that they needed to connect as easily as printers, and that security concerns were addressed?

Then …

Think of a world where AV integration expertise is directed to the areas that matter most. IT departments don’t need to run duplicate infrastructure of cable and switches. Extra routers and extenders aren’t needed, capital expenses are potentially cut in half, and everything becomes simpler. Sounds like truly converged networked AV.

AV Meets IT Needs

“IT folks who own the infrastructure want to minimize the number of things they need to manage and monitor,” says Daniel Jackson, Director of Enterprise Technology at Crestron. “To do that, AV needs to truly converge with IT.”

This is where Crestron’s DM NVX enters the picture. “Running on a standard 1-Gig Ethernet, the DM NVX has multiple HDMI outputs and native USB 2.0 routing already built into the one box,” says Alex Peras, Product Manager of DigitalMedia at Crestron. “The benefits that were already part of DigitalMedia, such as EDID, HDCP management, DSP downmixing and a lot more, are part of the new DM NVX.”

With DM NVX, all AV can run on the building’s existing Ethernet infrastructure, which saves an enormous amount of money by not needing to purchase and install new specialized cable such as CAT-6a, CAT-7, or fiber. “Not only is there a huge cost savings in labor, think of one box [DM NVX] replacing large, fixed matrix switchers, USB extenders, HDMI switchers, and extra encoders,” says Peras.

Two reasons AV had been relegated to its own network were security concerns and that AV needed a proprietary infrastructure. With advanced compression technologies such as enabling 4K60 4:4:4 HDR on 1-Gig Ethernet and working with companies such as Intel (see “What’s Inside” below), these concerns have been addressed with DM NVX.

“The DM NVX runs on the same Crestron control platform everyone is used to,” says Peras. “And network-grade security is built in, including 802.1X, Network Access Control, SSH, TLS, HTTPS, and AES-128.”

Configuration and deployment are easy using DM NVX Director, an enterprise-grade network appliance that provides a single point to monitor, manage, and control the entire DM NVX system from a web browser. NVX Director automatically discovers up to 1,000 endpoints, creates groups or domains, maps network addresses to user-friendly names, troubleshoots, and more.

AV Meets IoT

Device configuration, firmware upgrades, and monitoring via the cloud are in the IT wheelhouse. “DM NVX will have native support for Crestron’s XiO Cloud,” says Jackson. Crestron has confirmed the firmware upgrade for DM NVX will be available mid-June.

“The cloud is hugely important to our industry and will be critical to a deployment on shared infrastructure,” says Jackson. “I think this will blow people's mind with the ability to do what we call ‘plug-in and provision.’ You can remotely configure the device ahead of time and without ever physically touching it. Once the device is plugged in and can reach the service, it will pull down its complete configuration.

Anybody doing a deployment for scale can set all this stuff up ahead of time, and then it just plugs in, and you get the configuration.” One of the biggest challenges of deployment is going through and verifying that everything actually works. “If management consultants came into our industry, it would blow their mind how much labor and effort has to go into deploying every single system. That's because as an industry we were forced to build things like the auto industry did before the Model T came along with the advanced production line. We as manufacturers needed to build better tools to enable the industry to grow. The ability to deploy, manage and monitor via the cloud is a game-changer,” says Jackson.

IT Meets AV Industry Giant

With nearly 50 years experience, Crestron has risen as the leader in enterprise AV control, automation, and solutions. Although it’s a privately held company, Crestron is no small firm. According to a January 2017 interview with Bloomberg, CTO Fred Bargetzi shared that Crestron was a $1.5 billion company. Most of that growth has come in the last six years; a 2012 Forbes article stated the company had $500 million in annual revenue.

“It wasn’t that long ago we had a hard time getting the best companies to talk to us, because we just weren't to that scale,” says Peras. “Now, it's radically changed. We have chip vendors and technology providers coming to us to help them with their roadmaps and guide them to build better solutions.”

The relationship with Intel culminated in DM NVX. It is an iterative build (a significant one) upon DigitalMedia that has been widely deployed, and technology features evolving since its release in 2008. “Every piece of technology that was in previous DigitalMedia products are present in DM NVX network video solutions,” says Peras.

What’s Inside

In a statement in February 2017, Intel announced that the company was providing its Arria 10 FPGA devices for Crestron’s DigitalMedia NVX (DM NVX) technology architecture, which was demonstrated at Integrated Systems Europe (ISE) later that month.

What’s inside Intel’s Arria 10 FPGA device helped catapult DM NVX to the forefront and changed Crestron’s networked AV story.

Nanometers, TFLOPS, and FPGAs

The AV industry may already have too many speeds, feeds and acronyms to remember—but the IT world wrote the book.

The field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is an integrated circuit designed to be configured by a customer after manufacturing. The FPGA enables in-field firmware upgrades, eliminating the need for hardware upgrades and minimizing truck rolls.

“When programmable, customizable Intel FPGAs are built into these systems, they enable designers to re-architect enterprise networks to support collaboration for 4K, and ultimately [create] even higher-performance 8K networks,” wrote Erhaan Shaikh, vice president and general manager of the Intel Programmable Solutions Group, in an article discussing the DM NVX launch.

The Arria 10 FPGA spec sheet is a veritable what’s what of AV performance: 4K60 4:4:4 10-bit high-resolution video scaler, visually lossless encoding/decoding, HDMI 2.0a connectivity, ultra-low-latency Ethernet, and TFLOPS of digital signal processing (DSP) performance.

Scale and Reliability

Crestron’s growth has allowed the company to manufacture products at scale. “A lot of what we do today is automated manufacturing,” explains Peras. “We have 3D X-ray machines to examine solder joints underneath chips where they aren't visible. These are complex manufacturing processes, and between that and our industry connections we're able to manufacture something that frankly is a lot more reliable than we would have been able to do five to 10 years ago.”

DM NVX may be a new product, but its 10-years of development has paid off. “Our RMA rate is so low that I can't put a number on it,” says Peras. “That’s in large part due to the fact that we've been designing products for so many years, we take the things we've learned and put it into the NVX. It gave us that ability to perform.”

It’s a global world, and with scale comes a global supply chain. “We effectively control all the factories that make our products, and that gives us tighter control over the entire supply chain.” Crestron has 90 regional offices around the globe and three distribution warehouses located in the United States, Belgium, and Australia. “Smaller companies have to go through distribution, making it more difficult to ensure quality,” adds Peras.

With rapid growth comes large-scale challenges. “We're at the stage now where we've sold so many NVXs that Intel is running out of supply of the particular chips we need. With the scale we're at now, and with our relationships, we're able to solve it with our supply chain,” concludes Peras.

AV/IT

Intel and Microsoft have booths at InfoComm, and it’s clear these IT giants have more than taken notice of the AV industry. It’s an exciting time.

Make sure you visit Crestron during InfoComm at booth C2562 to discuss these topics and learn how AV now runs on the enterprise network.

During the two weeks following InfoComm, watch for the last two of six installments of the InfoComm Networked AV Series, in which Jackson and Peras discuss Successful Web Collaboration, and Networked AV via The Cloud.

InfoComm18 Networked AV Series:

One of Six: Networked AV — More Than a Disrupter

Two of Six: Not All Digital AV Needs to be On the Network

Three of Six: 4K Networked Video Image Quality, 1-Gig, and the Latency Discussion

During the last two years, the primary purpose of this series of Byte-Sized Lessons was to assist the AV industry in understanding TCP/IP technology. We’ve discussed and examined protocols, addressing, standards, and how IP is used. This article will present a case study and give you the opportunity to apply what these lessons have shown.

SITUATION

Abigail works for XYZ Company as a video technician. She installs cameras, encoders, decoders, digital signage, DVRs, and similar AV devices. Recently, the company consolidated two offices and she inherited a camera from the one that was closed. She would like to redeploy it in her network. She knows the office that closed used the subnet address 192.168.18.0/24 and she is confident that the password shared by all the company cameras is the same. She can use the Ethernet/web interface to the camera but must know the current IP address that has been assigned to it. Unfortunately, the technician who knows the address left the company when the office closed. How can she get the address? I suggest you pause to think about a possible method and then read further.

POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS

Some people would quickly respond, “Do a factory reset and start over.” However, there is a disadvantage to that method. Even if it can be done, after the reset, all firmware upgrades will need to be reinstalled, which could be time consuming.

Most IT technicians would immediately think of using the free software utility Wireshark. With it, you can see and record all packets on a network. By connecting it to the camera, you can analyze how it attempts to join the network.

Turning now to the camera: when it boots, it will follow a procedure much as any network-attached computing device would. Let’s say the camera is configured with the address 192.168.18.22. One of the first things the camera will likely do when it is powered on is to determine if that address is already in use. So, it will send an ARP (address resolution protocol) packet as a broadcast, which asks, “Does anyone have the address 192.168.18.22? Tell my mac address about it.” If Abigail has Wireshark connected to the camera and running, she’ll see this exchange.

Suppose the camera doesn’t usually check for duplicated addresses. It is still very likely that it will attempt to connect to its local router (gateway). If the camera is configured in the typical manner, its router will be 192.168.18.1. Again, when the camera is powered on, Abigail can use Wireshark to see the ARP packet asking, “Who has the address 192.168.18.1? Tell 192.168.18.22.” With the IP address and the password, she can now reconfigure the camera for her own network.

This process is simple and should take no more than five minutes. If you are responsible for device support and maintenance, Wireshark is an excellent tool to have installed on you PC.

Phil Hippenstel, PhD, is a regular columnist with AV Technology. He teaches information systems at Penn State Harrisburg.