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Audio Conferencing Service Basics |
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Written by Dwayne Hall
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Friday, 20 June 2008 |
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Audio conferencing services are offered by independent service bureaus. Long distance providers usually use sophisticated call connection "bridges" to join many different phone calls into a single conversation. Conferencing services allow meetings to take place even when everyone cannot be in the same room, connecting people in different branch offices for a sales meeting or providing quarterly results to investors.
by DwayneHall
Audio conferencing services are offered by independent service bureaus. Long distance providers usually use sophisticated call connection "bridges" to join many different phone calls into a single conversation. Conferencing services allow meetings to take place even when everyone cannot be in the same room, connecting people in different branch offices for a sales meeting or providing quarterly results to investors.
Customer can access the conferencing service with a dial-in number and an optional password to disseminate among the group of callers. Such a password to access the service can be either permanent, with a limited usage (number of calls, time period, etc.), or created only for a single teleconference session.
How Should You Decide?
Also with web conferencing every participant will need to be online, which means everyone would need a computer and access to the Internet. If the conference is audio web video conferencing, it will have to be a high-speed connection. While web conferencing is usually more expensive, the fact that infinite amounts of data can be transferred and immediately reviewed easily outweighs this factor.
A video conference electronically links geographically dispersed participants so that they can see and hear each other in a live and interactive environment. Polycom is the standard conferencing equipment at K-State. The K-State Accord bridge allows for multipoint conferencing (multiple sites convening for one conference.) Noninteractive video experiences such as satellite programs, video streaming, web casting, etc.
Sharing Capabilities
Web conferencing with audio provides an appropriate medium for incorporating certain visual elements into the flow of verbal communication, enabling participants to view a PowerPoint presentation, take a guided Web tour or collaborate on documents with others. In many cases, Web conferencing can even enable remote control of a participant's computer. Web conferencing differs from video or voice over Internet protocol in that it involves sharing data over a browser while the parties use a teleconference.
At the time a conference attendee calls into the conferencing bridge, he or she also provides the IP address either to a live person who enters this information manually, or through touch-tone into an email processor. Once all this information is entered, the processor in the audio conferencing bridge compiles a list of all conference attendees including their IP addresses.
Possible Glitches
Audio conferencing is the battlefield upon which the control for the data collaboration services market share will be won. "This opportunity is truly a single-stroke market-share maneuver for the buying company," stated Herb Levitin, the President of Powercom in Santa Barbara, California. "The buyer benefits from owning and controlling a targeted customer list, rich in usage of data and audio conferencing revenue, to integrate and market new high margin data collaboration services, while simultaneously decreasing their competition's market-share."
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