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Conference Call Quality Important

There are a great number of conference call providers out there using all sorts of conference call equipment and hardware.  Some of it is good, and some of it is better, and as the old story goes, you get what you pay for.  To be sure, we use the best hardware on the market today and go that extra mile, and expense, to make sure you access the highest quality conference bridge hardware.  Fortunately, outages and breakdowns are rare.

That being said, there are several ways you can help improve the quality of your calls.  Remember, a conference bridge is just going to relay any sound it hears.  The technology is called full digital duplex, meaning that the conference bridge will pick up two or three, or even a hundred, people talking at once.  It doesn't isolate individual speakers or clip people off.  So whatever kind of background noises you hear on the conference call are coming from the participants phones -- fire sirens, dogs barking, kids screaming, etc.

Moderators have the ability to mute everyone on the call, except for those who call in using the host passcode.  That feature can be very useful, especially if you are formatting a call to a lot of people listening to just a few people.  For example, let's say you have a call where 3 people are going to be doing most of the talking.  Well, those 3 people can call into the conference using the Moderator (or Host) passcode.  When you're ready to mute everyone on the call, except the moderators, just press your command on the keypad and you instantly eliminate the background noise or bad connection.

This can be annoying when someone, for example, calls from a cell phone and has a bad connection.  The noises from that bad connection will echo throughout the conference.  So you want to encourage as many participants as possible to call from a solid landline phone, or at least call from a cell phone that is in a good transmitting and reception location.

Also, remember if you are using a speaker phone to call into the conference, that many of the speaker phones are NOT full digital duplex and will cut off speakers if someone else is talking.  That can also cause some problems, in addition to the fact they will pick all the background noise in a room.  Make sure things are quiet.  If you happen to find yourself in a conference call with bad quality, the first thing you should do is to hang up and try to get a better phone connection.  And/or have others do the same thing.  That usually, and easily, solves most of the problems.