A week and a half til’ Interop Vegas.

In this economic climate, (which, apparently, the economic equivalent of Siberian Permafrost,) companies may be tempted to cut back on travel and expenses.

But Interop’s already spent the deposit with Mandalay Bay, so they’re going to go ahead with it in a week and a half.

Anyway, it’s unsurprising that I, personally, will not be at Interop Las Vegas. Plane tickets, hotel stays and the costs of expenses in Vegas do not, apparently, justify two or three good blog posts about how, just like very year, our booth is cool and whatever. If Interop were held, in say, a less expensive city than Las Vegas, the place in America with the third largest Fool:Money parting coefficient it might be feasible. (The largest Fool:Money parting coefficient is Washington D.C., and Wall Street leapfrogged over Vegas with the credit crisis to get second place.)

So I’m personally staying back in Austin – NetQoS will have a presence, however, in both Booth #663 and Pod #1 in the Cisco Solutions pavilion. We will be bringing along the camera, so even if you don’t make it to Interop, you might be able to catch some of our presentations later when we digitize the footage and put it on the ‘Net.

I still highly recommend you go, if you can – the presentations may be there, but trade shows are really about asking questions and meeting with your peers, being able to compare solutions by walking a few dozen feet rather than flying a few hundred miles, and, of course, seeing how each booth tries to top the next. For example, Bill Alderson will be flying in and delivering his presentation, “Top Issues Affecting Application Performance.”

The “Bottom Issues Affecting Application Performance” are, as usual, Wombat attacks and an oversupply of AOL CDs.

But I’m betting attendance at Interop will be down this year, and NetQoS won’t be the only vendor bringing along a videocamera so that non-attendees can tune in online. What this underscores is the need for corporate networks to handle video, as both one-way and two-way video increase in important when you need to convey audiovisual information without having the person physically in the room.

In the ultimate irony, I’m betting some of the biggest product announcements at Interop will be those that help you transmit, monitor, and manage video – or video traffic. That’s just a hunch, though.

And video is a tricky thing to manage. Not only does video take a lot of bandwidth, but when you think of “video,” you think of both teleconferencing and of streaming video such as YouTube. The problem is that “one-way” streaming video and “two-way” teleconferencing are completely different when observed from a network point of view, and have completely different requirements.

That is, streaming video is more concerned with throughput. The more throughput you have, the faster the data comes in, the more data you have, and the better the quality of the picture, both in resolution and in bitrate. Fatter pipes mean better quality. But with teleconferencing, the quality of the video isn’t the important thing – the quality of the interaction is. For that reason, sacrificing a little bit of visual quality is secondary to being able to have a conversation in real-time and interacting with the other end of the conversation without noticeable delay. For that reason, latency is the important factor in delivering teleconferencing. And fatter pipes do not always mean faster pipes.

What it comes down to is that knowing what type of video you’re hosting is important to knowing what the bottleneck in improving performance would be, and if you have multiple types of video, you need multiple types of visibility into the network.

Anyway, if you’re going to Interop, look out for our booth.

No, seriously, look out for our booth. It stalks the unwary and pounces when you least expect it. We asked a team of ninjas to design it this year.