A Quick Introduction to Teleconferencing Services

Nowadays people on various points of the globe often have to be at meetings far away from where they are at the moment. You often have to talk to more people in another city or country before you make quick decisions, but you don’t always have the money or time to travel. Imagine a situation where your colleagues from different cities have to be at a sales meeting or you have to present your company’s results to investors. In such situations, teleconferencing or audio conferencing can be very helpful.

With this service, you can talk to many people at the same time, and make important decisions or solve problems in a few days or hours. Through teleconference services, you can connect more people - even hundreds of them – together, while you don’t have to spend too much on expensive equipment.

But how can you decide which service is the best for you?

There are two common types of teleconference services: reservationless and operator-assisted teleconferencing, but more and more people are using web conferencing as well.

With a reservationless teleconferencing service, you can start a teleconference any hour of the day if, for example, you want to contact more people who are in a different city or country. By signing up, you get a permanent telephone number for free, and a code for yourself and the others. Your partners can simply dial in and connect to the conference. Reservationless teleconferencing is mostly automatic, therefore it is much cheaper than operator-assisted conferencing, but at the same time it is also less „clever”.

With operator-assisted teleconferencing, you have an operator who helps you with the calls all the way from beginning to end. It is very useful if you want to bring together dozens or even thousands of people to make a meeting. Take care, though: operator-assisted teleconference services are more expensive, and you will have to sign up in advance.

Many people nowadays use web conferencing. There are many businesses who offer this service. In a web conference, you can share slides with others, surf through web sites or show how a software works. However, today in a web conference you can only bring a small group of people together. Things are changing, though. Some businesses, like Skype, are starting to offer free web conference services, and this type of conferencing is developing almost day by day.

You usually use teleconference services for one conference at a time. For most services, you can easily switch to another teleconferencing company without risk, so you don’t need to make long-time contracts.

For teleconference calls, you mostly pay for every person and every minute that you use. Nowadays prices are much lower than even a few years ago. For example, a teleconference for six people that lasts 45 minutes costs about $125. You can also pay a fixed monthly rate if you want to use teleconference services regularly.

Go on to read about the benefits of telephone conference calling
Go on the read more about teleconferencing