Web Phone Conferencing

You can look at web phone conferencing as a giant leap in conference calling. There was a time when phone conferencing with just three participants was considered high-tech. These days, you can enjoy 3-Way Calling effortlessly with your standard telephones. Exciting days lie ahead for web phone conferencing.

Before anything else, it's important to note this distinction. Simply put, web phone conferencing is phone conferencing which uses the internet as the transmission medium instead of plain old telephone services. Once your voice travels the web, a piece of technology called VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol is employed. VoIP uses both hardware and software components, which you don't have to understand at all, to deliver your conversations via the web. And the best part is you won't have to pay for any long-distance charges.

This is different from web phone conferencing wherein attendees use web conferencing software and then dials in using regular telephones via plain old telephone services. Web phone conferencing in its true sense pertains to the integration of voice within the web conferencing software itself.

With all these benefits, there are a couple of factors you must consider before holding a web phone conferencing.

First is the quality of voice transmission. Unless all hardware and software guidelines are met, your voice might come across as "choppy." Unlike traditional telephone services which use the Public Switched Telephone Network or PSTN, your voice will have to travel many different networks that could delay its timely transmission. This will cause your voice to break up. No doubt an unpleasant experience.

Second is additional cost. If you pay a monthly or annual flat rate, this obviously won't be an issue. But with pay-per-use meetings, you can expect cost to increase by the minute as this is an additional feature over-and-above the basic web meeting service. With this in mind, it's safe to say that you should only consider web phone conferencing if participants are scattered in more than one country to avoid international call expenses.

In time, the infrastucture involved in web phone conferencing will evolve to a point where high-speed transmission is common and cost is quite insignificant. If you follow the guidelines given above, you should be able to take advantage of this solution right now. In fact for a growing number of businesses and organizations, the time for web phone conferencing has already arrived.

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