Conference Calling
If you're into conference calling, it would be worth your money to
sign up for three-way calling with your local CO. And by each person in
the call having three-way calling of their own, additional parties can
be added.
If you only need to talk to two other people, three way calling is
clearly the way to go. Unfortunately, most conferences usually run to
five or six. The call quality on lashed up conferences drops rapidly as
you add users. A coworker used to do phone sales meetings with the CONF
button on a ROLM PBX, and by the time they added four or five people,
you could barely hear anything, even though the ROLM had a digital
bridge. AT&T and Sprint's conference bridges clearly do a lot of subtle
processing so you can hear the people who are talking while filtering
out the breathing and background noise from everyone else.
The New Jersey Bell business office insisted that the only
conference-like facility they have any more is three-way calling. There
is still a mention of conference calling in the phone book, though it is
ambiguous enough that it may mean to call your LD rather than local
operator to set it up. In any event, I rarely have need to talk to even
one person here in the World's Smallest LATA, much less two or more.
Conference Calling Services - Which
service is best?
Below are the features to look for in a calling service:
- Reliable conferencing bridge
- Good voice calling quality
- A written guarantee
- Great support staff to help your company in times of need
- An Instant Reply feature allowing others to review what was just
said
- Ability to reserve call online
- Call archiving and downloading options
- Call security
- Powerful operator functions
- And few distruptions
Conference Calls - What is it?
Conference calling is the ability to talk to multiple parties using
an internal platform which helps to facilitate multiway conversation.
As is the case, it is great for large companies with multiple offices,
since employees and managers can easily participate in conferences
through telephone, and now video.
More Conference Call Services
There are a large number of companies in this area, some specialize
in web enabled applications, while others rely only on existing
technology. Some of the newer companies are making features in
cell phones more conducive to new conferencing technologies. There
are literally hundreds of companies in this market and to find the best
one really depends on your preferences.
One which I have used in the past is Sonexis, who has a great, and
technologically robust solution. You may want to check them out
along with Webex, Onconference and ContactCall.
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