* Where 800-number access might be justified
In continuing our discussion of whether there is still a business justification for 800-number access to conference calls, we heard from another reader.
The reader writes:
“As a telecom manager, I am surprised that you would question the need for toll-free access to audio-conferencing. It is most definitely required for our large outsourcing clients and for our company. Our clients are global and so are we. To collaborate with our client, vendors, partners, as well as numerous third-party resources, toll-free access is a must.
”Despite the pundits breathlessly hyping voice and video over IP for conferencing, the fact remains that a lot of conferences need to involve parties who are not connected to your LAN or WAN, but who nevertheless must communicate real-time with you frequently.”
We’ll interject at this point that the entire discussion started in our newsletter with a discussion of various mechanisms for combining IP-based and PSTN-based conferences. The 800-number issue began as a footnote.
The same reader continued:
“I can see the need diminishing for toll-free or even toll access to audio-conferences. By the way, pricing for audio-conferencing, like pricing for [long distance and toll-free], has come down drastically over the last few years. I would bet that many of the readers are spending far less than 10 cents per minute, for even modest call volumes.”
The reader is correct that the cost for 800-number access is rapidly diminishing. In fact, we recently found that one service, FreeConferenceCall.com, offers 800-number access for 9 cents per minute. Thus, the price for a 30-minute call with 50 participants is $135. Is this a sizable chunk of change? Or a rounding error in the petty cash fund? Depends on your perspective.
So why does a company named FreeConferenceCall.com charge at all? It’s the 800-number access. And we believe they’re banking on the fact that they can sell additional services by offering standard access to conference calling bridges for free.
So maybe the optimal solution here is to use a service that allows both free and toll access. That way, people who need 800-number access may use it, but we also end up not paying needlessly for 800-number access where it’s not required.
