anies, cable television providers, carriers, and new hybrid companies are satiating demand with high-bandwidth transmission service based on coax, fiber, wireless WAN, and digital subscriber line (DSL) service. Most city-dwellers enjoy broadband local loop alternatives from all three of these options; pushing such choices to urban dwellers is a matter of time (and cost). Increased bandwidth leads to better multimedia transmission. From the point of view of a video conferee, this translates to improved resolution, motion handling, audio quality, and audiovisual synchronization. Broadband transmission makes personal conferencing communication realistic. Coincidental with the upgrade of the U.S. telecommunications infrastructure, a similar undertaking is in progress within organizations. The LAN is the corporate equivalent of the local loop. Video communications over corporate LANs have been simplified by overwhelming standardization on IP over Ethernet. Like the Internet, Personal Conferencing Ethernet was designed for character-oriented exchanges. One popular trend is deployment of organizational intranets (networks within an organization) and extranets (networks that connect subsets of organizations). These enterprise-wide, hypertext-linked, multimedia-enabled networks connect PCs to server-based information caches, media servers, and communication gateways. LAN- based personal conferencing is a natural extension of corporate intranets. Figure 15-3. Personal Conferencing (courtesy of Tandberg). If the 1990s go down as the decade of the desktop PC, the following decade will go down as the decade of the wired Personal Digital Assistant (PDA). It is no wonder that today's enterprises are becoming increasingly distributed. With the tools to make one's office any place that is convenient at hand, why waste time traveling or going to the office? That said, the synergy that can result from collective investigation and development of ideas over distance requires fine-tuning and requires special tools. Personal conferenci