Phone Conferences
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Contents
Introduction
From time to time, to discuss a project or a task, people need to get together on the phone instead of using e-mail, IRC or instant messaging. In most countries, people can initiate three-party conferences themselves via their regular phone line, with the disadvantage that it costs a lot and they have to pay everything on their own. While for a long time only companies could afford to host a professional conferencing system, there now exist some public conference services to make our lifes easier. This page is intended to give some links to free conference services anyone can use. Free means that you don't have to pay any monthly or one-time fees, apart from the phone rates.
Important: Never discuss highly secure and confidential issues on a free conferencing system as long as you don't know anything about how thrustworthy it is. I have not done a security audit to the conference providers below, they are just a representative snapshot of offers.
Overview of services
In general, there are three types of services we can distinguish: services initiated with software running on your PC; services where conference attendees dial in using a normal phone and a phone number, i.e. regular dial-in services; services where conference attendees are being called by the conferencing system on their regular phone numbers.
using your computer
If you are a user of Skype you can easily initiate phone conferences. While calls to other Skype users are free, calls to external phones are not. You can, however, mix non-Skype conference attendees with Skype conference attendees.
regular dial-in services
Austria
- conferencenow offers vanity numbers for several countries. It costs between 0,034 EUR and 0,174 EUR per minute.
Belgium
- conferencenow offers vanity numbers for several countries. It costs between 0,034 EUR and 0,174 EUR per minute.
France
- conferencenow offers vanity numbers for several countries. It costs between 0,034 EUR and 0,174 EUR per minute.
Germany
- A service called talkyoo offers fixed-line numbers for many countries that can even be reached with mobile phones, and might even be much cheaper than using vanity or services numbers. As of January 2010, talkyoo conferences are limit to 6 concurrent users. Larger conferences are only available as a service plan.
- A similar service is being offered by phonesty. Offering a regular number Germany and US-dialin. Is still in beta with some outages.
- Voiceconference offers a vanity number inside Germany that costs 0,039 EUR/Minute. Might be much more expensive from cellphones and from foreign countries.
- conferencenow offers vanity numbers for several countries. It costs between 0,034 EUR and 0,174 EUR per minute.
Great Britain
- conferencenow offers vanity numbers for several countries. It costs between 0,034 EUR and 0,174 EUR per minute.
Spain
- conferencenow offers vanity numbers for several countries. It costs between 0,034 EUR and 0,174 EUR per minute.
Switzerland
- conferencenow offers vanity numbers for several countries. It costs between 0,034 EUR and 0,174 EUR per minute.
USA
- Adobe ConnectNow seems to be a similar service.
regular dial-out services
No regular dial-out services have been tested yet. Have you? Feel free to add them to this page!
web services
Links
- http://www.teltarif.de/i/konferenz.html?page=4 - list of German conference services