Meetings take place daily in the corporate and academic world, and videoconferencing facilitates these meetings. RNP provides the academic community with a Videoconference service for real-time communication, through the Ipê network.

This service provides virtual rooms that allow meetings between participants geographically distant from each other. The interconnection of two or more videoconferencing rooms, also known as a CODEC or endpoint, is performed in an equipment called a Multipoint Control Unit (MCU). RNP maintains a set of such equipment with high capacity and high availability for use by its client institutions. Thus, customers do not need to invest in infrastructure or specialized teams.

It is possible to record the meetings and broadcast them live, by streaming and, if the institution’s endpoints support it, it is still possible to carry out high-definition videoconferences (HD). In addition, the service has a connection to the telephone network, allowing participation from conventional, fixed or mobile telephone terminals.

The main benefits of using this service are agility for decision-making, increasing productivity, and saving time and money by eliminating the need to travel. This service has been widely used in national and international meetings, as well as defenses of theses and dissertations.

Long-standing partnership

The Telemedicine University Network (Rute) use the technological resources of RNP to attend to the area of Health, contributing to projects in telemedicine already existing and encouraging the emergence of new works in the country. Currently, it connects and integrates more than 125 telemedicine units, as well as supporting videoconferencing, diagnostic analysis, second opinion and permanent education, through RNP’s communications infrastructure.

The Videoconferencing service is widely used by Rute, either in the thematic meetings of the 60 Special Interest Groups (SIG), in the articulation and preparation meetings of new projects or in the Support Program for Residency Programs in Professional Health According to the national coordinator of Rute, Luiz Ary Messina, the creation of the digital health, telemedicine and telehealth communities would never have reached the current visibility, credibility and recognition without the use of this service.

“The Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries (CPLP) and the BRICs have relied on the experience of RNP’s Video Collaboration services to plan and implement similar actions and publicize their telemedicine initiatives. Recently, Russia used our videoconferencing infrastructure in the Brasília office, the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais [Federal University of Minas Gerais] (UFMG) and Inca to publicize its projects. In addition, the integration made possible by this service was fundamental for us to approve, in 2016, the Strategic Guide for the Implementation of Telehealth at CPLP”, he highlighted.

One of the groups that has benefited from the Videoconference service of RNP is the SIG Health of Children and Adolescents, created in 2008, which organizes sessions for the sharing and updating of medical information throughout the country. Since 2009, more than 90 sessions have been held by the group, involving 650 professionals from various courses and university hospitals in the area of health and medicine of children and adolescents, involving 40 institutions.

“The collaboration between our professionals has become more dynamic with real-time and distance communication, national and international, disseminating and updating medical knowledge and knowledge for the health and medicine of Brazilian children and adolescents”, prides itself the coordinator of the SIG, Dr. Evelyn Eisenstein, Associate Professor, Department of Pediatrics, FCM-Uerj.

The doctor also reported the recent results obtained by videoconferencing meetings. “We have achieved an increase in productivity, knowledge and medical update, for example in sessions carried out in the Dengue, Chikungunya and Zika Virus epidemics, allowing us to be more agile in the ability to synthesize and communicate relevant and emergency contents for the decision making”, highlighted Evelyn.

Enabling international meetings

The advantages of the service have stimulated partnerships with several institutions with leading projects in Brazil and worldwide. An example of the use of the service was the feasibility of the Workshop on Soar Science 2020 (photo 2), held in March 2017, which brought together scientists from Brazilian and American institutions responsible for the Southern Astrophysical Research telescope (Soar).

The edition was made remotely, with the connectivity provided by the RNP Point of Presence in Rio de Janeiro (PoP-RJ) and with the virtual room service, recording and live transmission performed by our organization. “The support of RNP was fundamental to make feasible the workshop, which would be impossible to perform in person due to lack of resources”, said Bruno Castilho, director of the National Laboratory of Astrophysics (LNA).

The service was also used at the XIV six-month J-PAS meeting, Javalambre Physics of the Accelerating Universe Astrophysical Survey, which is carrying out a unique photometric celestial survey of the sky. “For the first time, it will be possible to map not only the position of hundreds of millions of galaxies in the sky, but their individual distances to us, providing the first complete 3D map of the Universe that extends more than 9 billion light years from Earth”, explained the researcher in Astrophysics of the National Observatory (ON), Renato Dupke.  

The event, also held in March, brought together 85 members of the J-PAS collaboration from Brazil and Spain, as well as members from Portugal, France, Italy, England, USA, Venezuela, Argentina and Chile. “The help from RNP and the ON IT group was extremely helpful in solving potential problems, adjusting the meeting environment as required by us, assisting participants with the use of peer-to-peer software etc. This allowed the meeting to be successfully carried through to the end and without delays”, concluded Dupke.  

Videoconference from your personal computer

The RNP service has software that enables videoconferencing from a personal computer, that is, without a traditional CODEC (photo 3). For this, it is necessary to have only a headphone, a microphone, a camera and meet the criteria for use, as defined by RNP. This software is also supported for mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets. Its use is made available temporarily, in case of unavailability of a traditional videoconferencing equipment.