I am sure you have seen them if you have done a search for conference calls on the internet. Free conference calls. So what is the deal? Are they really free? How do they afford to do that?
Well I am sure you have also heard the saying, “There is no such thing as a Free Lunch” and with free conference calls it is all too true. First of all who had the idea in the first place and how do they make money? A number of years ago someone had the idea to give away conference calls in order to generate traffic to a carriers’ network, because the carrier gets paid by the long distance carriers a small amount of money to terminate the call on the local network. So, even though to you the conference call is “free” the conference call service provider is paid by the carrier for the traffic they are generating. So, then it is a Free Conference Call, right? Not exactly.
The problem with the free conference call is that you have to pay a long distance charge to whoever your long distance provider is in order to get to the location where their conference call equipment is installed. Let’s say that their equipment is in Kansas City for instance. You and all of your participants have to pay the long distance charge, per minute to connect to Kansas City. Now that rates for toll free conference calls have come down, why would you want to have hidden charges for you and your participants?
There are other problems with many of these free conference call services. Some are using VOIP to connect the call resulting in poor quality. Many will have capacity issues because they really can’t afford to have lots of equipment sitting idle because their financial model is so thin. Many of the conference call features you will get with a toll free conference call service provider are not available with a free conference call service provider. In order to compensate for some of these shortfalls some of the free providers started offering toll free conference calls as well. But the pricing for these services is higher than some of the conference call service providers that are built to provide a high quality service like Zip Conferencing. So, you end up paying a higher price for a lower grade of service.
So, why would anyone use a free conference call service? Because its “free”. In the end, like so many other things in life, with conference calls you get what you pay for.
www.zipconferencing.com