Conference Call a la Ustream!

Kaybenson

Hi folks,

I belong to a group of over 50 people. We need to have group discussion but do NOT fancy skype. We intend to engage a paid conference call where 10 people will do the discussion together for like 20minutes while the remaining people(over 30) listen to the discussion LIVE on ustream. All will be audio-conferencing.

This will save us some money.

Is this the best reasonable approach?

Cheers

Kay

InsideInsurance

In what sense save you money? Save you as an organisation because of the cost of the conference number or save the members in terms of the telephone call charges?

JasX

Kaybenson wrote: »

Is this the best reasonable approach?

Skype would be far superior assuming all participants have internet access, even expensive 'enterprise' level conferencing and meeting software used in larger companies is starting to look alot like skype etc these days.

eg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Lync
http://lync.microsoft.com/en-gb/launch/Pages/launch.aspx

If your participants *must* use a telephone you can pick one of the old style paid for conference call providers and pay thru the nose for doing it that way but I believe getting someone to stump up for an inexpensive skype-in number would allow the non-internet dinosaurs to participate and keep costs down.

Kaybenson

InsideInsurance wrote: »

In what sense save you money? Save you as an organisation because of the cost of the conference number or save the members in terms of the telephone call charges?

I checked with a US company that a friend's company used. It cost just 9p a minute per participant. So my calculation is if 10 people joined the network by phoning that will be 90p per minute for everyone. By using 10 minutes,the whole thing will cost 9GBP.

If possible, others can then listen to the discussion of others.


People find it easier to phone that linking up via skype.

S0litaire

how about this:
http://www.powwownow.co.uk/Web-Conferencing
you get a local rate number (0844) so people can call in.

As far as i can tell it's free. only the cost of a local rate call, if people use it to join in. They allow up to 50 participants without pre-booking a session.

JasX

So the vast majority of participants (the spectators) need to be online anyway to get the on ustream feed.

You have 10 main participants who cba to get online and need to phone in for which they're stumping up phone bills and you are paying £20-£30 odd per 20-30 minute session.

This as an alternative to skype which would cost less than the above 1 session cost per year for a skype-in number to allow the complete luddites to still use the phone. Then have a zero ongoing cost per session.

Hence on a cost basis its pretty clear why the vaguely financially and technically competent are moving, if not to skype then to 'similar to skype' type services.

richard734

if you can manage teh numbers so people are in groups on a speaker phone

http://www.t-mobile.co.uk/business/services/call-management/conference-calling/

07953 953 953

We used to keep that number as a back up in case our normal conf call number was unavailable,