eli@pws.bull.com (Steve Elias) (08/29/90)
If you're into conference calling, methinks it would be worth your money to sign up for three-way calling with your local CO. The quality of conferences through the local CO is *outstanding* in my experience. it's about $2 or $3 per month here in the Beantown area. Also, with this method of conferencing, you can choose the carrier for each leg of the conference. For example, if one of the conferees is in one of those extremely rare areas :) which don't get good Sprint service, you can use ATT to dial that person, while using Sprint to dial the other conferee. eli [Moderator's Note: And by each person in the call having three-way calling of their own, additional parties can be added, with each of the two people you call responsible for adding one more, etc. Also, if your multi-party conference call is strictly local in scope, try your local telco operator. They can also handle conference calls provided everyone is local. PAT]
johnl@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us (John R. Levine) (09/01/90)
In article <11531@accuvax.nwu.edu> you write: >If you're into conference calling, methinks it would be worth your >money to sign up for three-way calling with your local CO. >[Moderator's Note: 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, my 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. >Also, if your multi-party conference call is strictly local in scope, try >your local telco operator. They can also handle conference calls >provided everyone is local. 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. Regards, John Levine, johnl@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us, {spdcc|ima|world}!esegue!johnl