It maintains an advanced video transmission network that cost-effectively transports high quality video images for distance learning, educational programming, telemedicine and teleconferencing, among other applications. For example, students throughout the state can attend classes interactively via videoconferencing. The university can also transmit educational programming to the local cable television station, which sends it to households all over the Chapel Hill area, as well as to desktop computers on campus and throughout the world via the Internet. Its backbone transmits images from different sites to the studios that send them on to the end user.
Departments send the images in a variety of formats.
This means the backbone must support everything from 28.8 modem and compressed video to fully compressed digital and high-definition video. Demanding applications that require low latency and high quality, such as telemedicine and distance learning, require a backbone that can send uncompressed images from studio to studio, ensuring high quality signals and low degradation. This is particularly important when signals leave UNC's campus and enter the wide area heterogeneous network environment, where analog and compressed signals can degrade after traveling through numerous pathways. Standards-based Approach UNC has a fixed annual technology budget, so it must get the most functionality out of its video equipment for its money. Thus, the university uses mainstream, standards-based technology that will work in a multivendor environment, rather than being locked into a proprietary technology.