VisionAIR Trials: Maroussi

In the VisionAIR trial, the municipality of Maroussi will provide the following bundle of services to the citizens of the pre-selected areas having broadband access.

Teleassistance Services

Videoconferencing allows face-to-face meetings without the time, cost, and inconvenience of travel. The Municipality will use a simple audio/videoconference facility to enhance an existing tele-assistance service with civil orientation for elderly/ disabled people. The Municipality will launch a generic tele-assistance service, which has medical orientation (telemedicine). This service will be provided in cooperation with the Municipal Medical Centre. Moreover, as the project is going on, the Municipality will try to collaborate with Medical Centres (e.g. Athens' Medical Centre, Amaroussion Centre for Social-Psychological Support) to provide more enhanced services, such as psychological support for elderly or disabled people. The bearer service is Videoconference and the content provider is the Municipality together with the involved external enterprise.

Telephony services

The Municipality will offer free Packet Voice service for citizens communicating within the Visionair network, mostly for people getting access to hotlines and informative sessions but if proven viable, also for individual use. Concurrent access to the Internet will be possible for the users that have access through the PC.

The Municipality will try to offer commercial low cost VoIP services cooperating with a VoIP provider.

In order to connect the system to the public network (PSTN, ISDN), a commercial VoIP provider will be needed. Such VoIP providers in Athens area are Forthnet, and Intraconnect. We plan to get connected to these providers through leased lines with a basic capacity of 8-16 concurrent outgoing lines to start with. We are still in discussion with them to sort out all technical requirements and associated costs, especially about the ability to put in place a billing infrastructure that can charge accordingly those who use external access (national-international calls).

For the providers, participation in this trial will be used as an opportunity to try advanced packet voice services on a real broadband infrastructure. To this extent, it is more important to verify interoperability issues and sort out problems related to the management and billing of the provided service, even if at the beginning this will not be a real commercial offering.

Internet services

Free high-speed Internet access to all the VisionAir users. Here, the Municipality will be the high-speed service provider to the number of citizens whose homes are on the broadband network. VisionAIR will provide high-speed access to the City Hall facilities - from then on, the connection to the Internet will follow the moderate connection speed of the City Hall, but the VisionAIR users (including two schools) will have the ability to communicate at a high speed with the central Maroussi facilities. Moreover, a typical proxy service will ensure that cached content will become available at high speed to local connections.

Video services

Streaming Video services will be offered. Electronic cameras are going to be installed in the city council hall so that the citizens can attend the city council sessions. Sessions of the city council will in the framework of VisionAIR be recorded by means of electronic cameras and broadcasted on the trial network from a local server, residing in the City Hall.

In addition, a high quality Video on Demand (VoD) service will be considered. Video on Demand is a large database of movies, which people can choose and receive any time they want.

Some examples of VOD services include:

• Movies, concerts, shows, performances delivered on demand
• Subscription- service delivery of a digitally recorded event such as special sports presentations, matches and games
• News on demand
• Distance learning
• Home shopping

From the contacts we had so far with video content provider, it is not very possible that we will be able to experiment with a fully commercial solution. We will foresee that the VoD service will be able to offer video clips, film preview trailers, as well as non-highly commercial material in general. However, we are optimistic that if we demonstrate a proper operation of the system, we will be able to also solicit a small number of commercial films for this service.

Whatever the case, our main interest is to bring commercial attention to our foreseen experimental platform, and identify possible ways to bring the experiment into a reality with actual users.

On line gaming services

Pre-selected games, installed in a dedicated game server in the City Hall, will give the opportunity to VisionAIR users of playing with or against each other.

VisionAIR users, using their broadband connection, will revolutionise their online multiplayer gaming for educational purposes. Where with dial-up or even ISDN connections on line gaming feels like "playing through syrup", there's barely any lag, or latency using a broadband connection. This means users, can do much more, much faster.

Network Overview