[loteck]

Proprietary telepresence systems have been around for a long time and they are good enough for keeping international relations going between country's governments, so they probably would be good enough for your company. They are more expensive than you might think they should be until you get into the engineering and understand what it takes to make it seamless and reliable.

The question is, does your organization actually know the value of communication between remote parties? Companies that actually run the numbers on the value of remote collaboration can pretty easily figure out if it's worth it.

[greedo]

We had a Cisco conference setup for two joined conference rooms back in 2014? It was like $500K per site. It was terrible, picture quality was 1080i with bad sound, but something an exec would love cosplaying as a member of the NSC. The thing couldn't easily handle conferees using webcams etc. Got torn out when the support contract ended and converted into a traditional conference room.

[loteck]

That number sounds high to me.

Is your contention here that the technology to make this seamless and reliable experience doesn't exist, or are you agreeing with me that it's not trivial to implement?

[greedo]

I think that unless you're a nation-state with huge budgets, creating a seamless and reliable experience is relatively non-existent. We've tried all the major vendors for conference rooms, and they all have sharp edges that give you continual paper cuts. The same is true for tech for remote users (Teams, Slack, etc etc.). That doesn't mean they're not good enough, but they definitely still suck.