TABLE OF CONTENTS Once you have gone through the effort to put video, audio, and data into IP packets, chances are that you are going to want to move the packets from one network to another. One of the great strengths of IP networking is the huge variety of different technologies that have been successfully used to move packets over long and short distances. We begin this chapter with a discussion of some of the major technologies that are used to transport packets. We will then discuss several factors that need to be considered when evaluating transport technologies. A discussion of some of the impairments that can occur on networks follows next. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the Internet as a transport medium, and a brief look at service levels. By the end of this chapter, the reader should have a good appreciation of the wide variety of options that are available for IP packet transport and understand some of the network conditions that can affect video signal transport.
In many cases, end users have little or no control over how their IP traffic is transported between their locations. Packets are handed to a network provider at one location and delivered back at another. In between, there may be multiple different networks, belonging to multiple different service providers. In other cases, users with private networks can decide which technologies they will use for video packet transport. In either case, the following sections will help users to understand a few...
