IP, ISDN, and ATM Infrastructures for Synchronous Teleteaching - An Application Oriented Technology Assessment.

The quality and diversity of communication scenarios in distance education depend strongly on the available bandwidth. With the increase of existing network capacity teleteaching applications improve enormously in quality and quantity. Synchronous teleteaching which was initially just a video-stream based transmission of lectures is meanwhile enriched with multimedia applications and moves towards multimedia conferencing sessions. Advanced communication infrastructures for synchronous teleteaching applications are introduced. Solutions are based on standard desktop conferencing tools and streaming tools over IP on the one hand and transmission of media streams over ISDN and ATM codecs on the other hand. The pros and cons of each technology are outlined. Recommendations for appropriate usage are given. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]