Yesterday I found myself with a project and no easy way to solve a problem. I needed to get three other people on a phone conversation, my service does not support Conference Calls, and even if it did I doubt that I could figure out the million buttons to press to get everyone on the line.
A couple of years ago I was invited to participate in a similar adventure and the audio quality was horrible, and that is being kind! It was a VOIP nightmare. There was lag and the ‘simplex’ nature of the beast made it even more frustrating. I can not remember the name of the service, but that likely is a good thing for the company involved.
Last night I decided to have another kick at the ‘Conference Call’ cat. Of course I was not willing to pay for it so I did a google search on ‘free conference calls’. There are lots of services available, but the one that caught my attention was InstantConference.com. I poked around the fairly stark web site and discovered that they do not use VOIP, they use real hardware. I liked that. I poked around some more, I was looking for the catch. In my mind there is always a catch, but I could not see one. Sure everyone has to dial a toll number, but the folks I hang out with all have free long distance. Without that we would all be facing 4 digit phone bills every month! Journalists make a lot of calls.
I signed up with InstantConference.com but I had some reservations. Could they really provide the goods? Unfortunately I had no chance to run a test, the people I needed to talk with were unavailable, I was flying blind.
The call was set for 1pm eastern, and it was with trepidation that I launched into it. As the ‘moderator’ I wanted to be there first. I called the supplied number a couple of minutes early, entered my access code and prayed. The first caller turned up shortly after. The quality of audio was outstanding. I could tell that this was a far cry from my nasty VOIP experience. The other two folks joined a couple of minutes later. There was no degradation in quality.
I did want to record the call, and asked the participants if they had any objections. There was none, so I hit the code on my phone, InstantConferance has a great feature, if you want to record a call they inform everyone involved and they must consent by pressing a key on their phone. This gives explicit rather than implicit consent, a great feature.
About 40 minutes into our conversation I got disconnected, I do not think it was a problem with InstantConference, rather it was a problem at my end. I dialed back in and was informed that this call was being recorded, if I wanted to join press 1. I liked this feature a great deal. In the back of my mind I was playing the scenario of what would happen if I host a call and start the recording feature before my subject(s) join. This showed me the answer. This is not a snoop system.
We concluded our discussion, and then I went in search of the recording. All of the participants wanted access. I won’t share the subject matter, but it is one that we have a mutual interest in, a crime story that is in the national news every day.
I searched around the web site for a way to find the recording. I came up blank. I had been impressed with the service up till now, it was easy to use, the audio quality was great, but were they going to let me down on the recording?
I fired off an email to Tech Support, this tends to be a pretty sketchy arena for free stuff. Within 10 minutes I had the answer. It takes about an hour or so to process the audio and convert it to a downloadable format. I would get an email when it was ready.
I did, I can chose to download the audio, or I can listen to a replay on my phone.
InstantConference has found a convert in Simon Barrett. Great quality of product, great support, what more could you ask for?
This is a service I will be using in the future.
Simon Barrett
2 users commented in " Product Review: InstantConference.com "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackWelcome to the 21st Century. I attend lots of internet marketing webinars with participants from around the globe. Depending on the weather, one could expect to lose audio or visual or both connectivity with the host for several minutes at a click. At the end of the session, there are several pieces of the conference that are missed. Shortly thereafter, an e-mail arrives in my in-box informing of availability of recorded playback of the conference for those who registered but missed the webinar for whatever reason. I have found that recorded playback of the session error free, stress free and more informative than the live sessions because there is no interruption. This occurred so often, I was of the opinion that it was the norm rather than the brand of equipment being used.
Oddly enough, I just got dropped from two calls in a row when I used Instant Conference as a moderator. I was able to dial back in quickly, but it was far from an ideal situation. On the second call, I switched phones and made sure I had a solid connection on my end, just to eliminate factors and determine where the issue was. Maybe a fluke, but pretty sure it was on Instant Conference’s side. They’ve been a pretty good provider for me over the last few years, but I’m nervous about using them again, especially for important calls.
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