Case study: custom-made conferencing solution for the Turkish parliament

A custom-made conferencing experience for the Turkish parliament in Ankara

Having operated for over 20 years, the analogue conferencing system in the Turkish parliament’s main plenary hall was marked for replacement in 2019. The parliament’s IT department went looking for a modern digital solution that would ideally combine high levels of user-friendliness, security, privacy, and redundancy. With these paramount requirements in mind, the parliament turned to Asimetrik – a trusted local AV integration company and Televic partner.

18 months of careful design and development

Already familiar with the Turkish capital after installing a Televic Confidea discussion system in Ankara’s council room in 2012, the Asimetrik confidently teamed up with Televic’s R&D spcecialist to take the lead in designing and installing a unique and individual conferencing solution. Midst of the covid-19 pandemic, this team effort was managed and executed remotely, but smoothly. The entire process from idea over design to implementation took 18 months and resulted in one of Televic’s largest deployments of conferencing technology in the world.

655 daisy-chained delegate units

To obtain full redundancy of the conferencing set-up, all 655 delegate units (10” UniCos multimedia touchscreen units) have been daisy-chained in 11 loops, each with a dedicated network extender. All loops are connected to a rack-mounted 19-inch Plixus multimedia engine that handles all the processing and signal handling. Integrated microphone splitters make sure that the necessary translation and broadcast features are supported.

In terms of meeting management, an advanced voting system is in place, steered and visualized from the chairman’s unit. This unit also manages the speaking requests queue, coming in from the request-to-speak buttons on each of the delegate units.  Once a request has been admitted, the remaining speech time is automatically displayed on two HD screens behind the chairman. The system was specifically set up to swiftly handle the network traffic connected this level of interactivity.

Bespoke conferencing solution with fingerprint identification

To meet the Turkish parliament’s bespoke software requirements, Televic’s R&D team customized the UniCos multimedia solution with the integration of a fingerprint-activated 10-inch touchscreen. With the exception of an RFID badge fallback solutions for 2% of the politicians with damaged finger skin surface areas, the Parliament now relies almost solely on fingerprint identification, which is quite unique. For this purpose, the individual fingerprints of all 600 parliament delegates were digitally recorded and securely stored.

Tailor-made API and seamless furniture integration

Working closely with their Turkish partner for software development, Asimetrik developed the user application program interface (API) in accordance with the demands of the Parliamentary IT division. The 18-inch gooseneck microphones were separately embedded into each seat’s desk. This maintains the aesthetic appearance of the furniture, with desktops that are only interrupted to include a 3.5mm earphone output.

Extensive testing and debugging

Allthough the design and development phase of the project needed to be managed remotely due to the pandemic, a small demo room was set up to run extensive tests with 20 delegate units. During these tests, the system was optimized with one-to-one Unicast transmission dedicated IP addresses for each individual conferencing unit. Once the parliament returned in full session, the final optimizations were done, and additional features were developed on-site. Today, the Turkish parliament relies on a unique, large-scale, and custom-made conferencing system that is completely in line with the parliament’s by-laws.