By David Jones, Executive Vice President, Hexatronic Integrated Technology
Five to ten years ago, organizations bought AV systems. Today, they invest in communication ecosystems. The conversation is no longer about equipment. It's about experience, integration, and business outcomes.
That shift has made Pro AV a core IT investment, with the focus now squarely on user experience, simplicity, reliability, and adoption.
It has also moved AV from standalone systems to network-dependent ones, a transition driven by hybrid work, smart buildings and real-time collaboration. The implications for bandwidth and infrastructure are significant.
IT leaders who aren't involved in AV decisions from the start risk problems that show up fast and expensively.
The Shift from Standalone to Network-Dependent AV
There was a time when AV lived on isolated systems. Not quite the 1980s, when “AV” meant a TV on a rolling cart with a power strip bolted to the side, but even recently AV was often treated as an add-on in building infrastructure design. Something addressed after the network was already planned.
That approach is no longer viable. Today, AV runs on the same IP network as everything else, and it's consuming a growing share of network resources. Three forces are driving this:
- Hybrid Work: Conference rooms have become the connective tissue between in-office and remote teams. AI-powered cameras, spatial audio, and interactive tools like digital whiteboards must perform seamlessly across the network. When a hybrid meeting fails, it's rarely because of the display. It's because the underlying network wasn't designed to support the room's demands.
- Smart Buildings: AV in today's intelligent facilities is tied into building management, lighting, HVAC controls, and occupancy sensing. Infrastructure must now support AV-over-IP, IoT sensors, and unified control platforms, all sharing bandwidth and network resources with core business traffic.
- Real-Time Collaboration: Persistent video rooms, interactive displays, and high-definition conferencing enable teams to collaborate continuously. These are no longer occasional use cases. For many organizations, they are always on, requiring sustained throughput, not just peak capacity.
Each of these trends places AV squarely on the network, competing for bandwidth, security, and management attention alongside every other enterprise system.
Bandwidth and Infrastructure Implications of Today’s AV
Today's AV systems rely on low latency, secure access, and ongoing software updates, especially as new technologies are integrated into everyday meeting environments.
Failing to account for high-resolution video, low-latency audio, wireless presentation, and AV-over-IP requirements will lead to problems, often quickly, and almost always expensively.
Pro AV is no longer an audiovisual concern. It's an infrastructure concern. The implications are tangible:
- Switching Capacity: AV-over-IP systems push high-bandwidth video streams alongside standard business traffic. Switches designed primarily for data and email traffic may struggle to handle sustained throughput for 4K video, multi-display environments, and real-time collaboration. Underspec your switching layer and you'll see dropped frames, latency, and user frustration.
- PoE Requirements: AV endpoints like IP cameras, ceiling microphones, touch panels, and displays are increasingly powered via PoE. Many require PoE+ or PoE++. Without adequate support, organizations are forced to add dedicated power, increasing complexity and cost.
- VLAN Segmentation: AV traffic needs to be isolated from general enterprise traffic for both performance and security. Without proper segmentation, AV streams compete with critical applications, and unsecured endpoints introduce risk. Segmentation is no longer optional. It's a baseline requirement.
- Cabling Infrastructure: The cabling plant must support modern demands. Legacy Category 5e cabling may still pass data, but it often falls short on bandwidth, PoE delivery, and distance requirements for AV-over-IP. Skipping a cabling assessment frequently leads to costly rework shortly after deployment.
Anyone in Texas has seen what happens when you load a half-ton pickup with a full-ton payload. It might move for a while, but something is going to give. The same principle applies to network infrastructure.
Why IT Leaders Must be at the Table
AV decisions were traditionally made by facilities teams or integrators without IT involvement. That worked when AV was isolated. It doesn't work when AV rides on the network.
IT leaders need to be involved from day one. Modern Pro AV depends on the same fundamentals as every other enterprise system:
- Network Capacity and Latency: AV-over-IP and real-time collaboration require predictable, low-latency performance. IT teams understand network capacity planning. Facilities teams generally don't and shouldn't be expected to.
- Security and Access Control: Every AV endpoint is a potential vulnerability. Devices must be inventoried, patched, and governed by the same policies as networked systems. When AV is deployed outside of IT oversight, these endpoints often sit unmanaged on the network.
- Quality of Service and Prioritization: Real-time AV traffic is highly sensitive to delay. QoS policies that prioritize AV traffic need to be configured at the network level, which means IT must be involved in defining them.
- Monitoring and Support: AV systems must be integrated into enterprise monitoring tools. Without visibility into AV endpoint health, firmware status, and performance metrics, issues go undetected until they disrupt critical meetings.
When AV is deployed outside IT oversight, these dependencies are overlooked. The result is rarely a complete failure, but it can be something more insidious: unreliable performance, poor user trust, and underutilized investments.
Planning Pro AV in coordination with IT infrastructure from the start prevents these problems and the lost productivity that follows.
A Smarter Approach to AV Infrastructure
The good news is that none of this requires reinventing infrastructure strategy. It requires including AV in existing processes.
In my experience, organizations that succeed tend to follow four consistent practices:
- Bring IT in Early: Not after the room is framed. At the programming and design phase, when network requirements, power distribution, and pathway routing are still on the table. When IT is involved early, AV requirements get designed into the infrastructure rather than bolted on after the fact.
- Standardize Room Types: Define repeatable room configurations, such as huddle rooms, medium conference rooms, boardrooms, and all-hands spaces, to reduce complexity, cost, and support burden. When every room is a custom design, every room becomes a custom support problem.
- Integrate Monitoring: Ensure AV endpoints appear in the same dashboards as network infrastructure. If your IT team can see when a switch port goes down but can't tell when a ceiling microphone drops off the network, you have a visibility gap that will surface at the worst possible time.
- Manage AV Like IT Assets: Apply firmware updates, security patching, and lifecycle planning just as you would for any connected device. An unmanaged AV endpoint on the network carries the same risk as an unmanaged laptop. The only difference is that nobody thinks to check it.
These are not aspirational goals. They're operational practices that organizations with mature infrastructure programs are already applying to AV. The shift is simply recognizing that AV belongs in the same governance framework as the rest of the network.
AV Is Part of the Digital Backbone
The days of treating AV as a separate line item managed by a separate team on a separate timeline are over. In today's hybrid workplace, AV is no longer just equipment in a room. It's part of the digital backbone that keeps an organization connected, productive, and competitive.
The organizations that recognize this shift and plan accordingly will build infrastructure that performs. The ones that don't will keep wondering why their most expensive conference rooms are the ones nobody wants to use.
