The phone conference call has been around for quite some time. And over the past 15 years that I have been in the industry there have been a lot of changes in technology but the phone conference call continues to thrive. Why is that? Certainly there must be a new phone app or PC program that would make a phone conference call disappear. I mean today you can have a video conference on your cell phone with another person. You can hook your PC up and use the Internet to call thousands of miles for nothing more than the price of your Internet connection. So a plain old phone conference call? Really? Let’s look at some of the competing technologies that have come about in the past 15 and some of the reasons they have not had the same success as the plain old phone conference call.
- Video Conferencing – The phone conference call has survived 15 years of advancements in video conferencing. The equipment you need to do a video conference call used to be very expensive and require a huge amount of bandwidth. So the telecommunications expense to have the ability to do a video conference was also huge. The video conference now can be done at home using your Internet connection and equipment that can be purchased just about anywhere. Businesses can purchase a small video conference system and have it installed on existing telecommunications infrastructure. So video conferencing is now easy and cheap. Why isn’t everyone talking to each other on a video phone like the Jetsons? A number of reasons have slowed the growth of video conferencing while the phone conference call continues to grow. You must go to where the system is and that means you need to be in the office. The home systems are not really business capable and the mobile application is not there yet either and universally available as you need a certain type of phone. A phone conference call can be done from anywhere and today business people are very mobile so having to be in a central location to do all your conference calls is not really practical. And the biggest reason I think is that people are just not comfortable with themselves on TV. Maybe the next generation, the YouTube generation will be more comfortable with it but most people I know do not like being in front of a video camera.
- VOIP Conferencing – Everyone now has a good Internet connection so why aren’t we talking to our PCs yet? One reason is you need to be in front of your PC in order to talk through it and again people are now mobile. Quality is much better than it used to be but VOIP quality is still only as good as the connection and some people still have bandwidth issues. And a lot of people don’t even have a microphone connected to their PC. It is just not what we are used to doing. A phone conference call only requires the same device everyone is familiar with, the phone.
- In House Systems – Over the years every phone system manufacturer has developed a way to do a phone conference call through their system. But the quality of the connection is limited and so are the number of people you can connect to the conference call. And it also requires the moderator to dial out to people and connect them to the conference call. The in-house conference call systems you can buy are hard to justify from an expense point of view and require someone to maintain. A conference call service can do the job better and cheaper than an in-house system.
So, you can see that a phone conference call continues to grow because none of the other options are as universally known, easy to use and inexpensive.