Technology has made huge strides over the past few hundred years, but it could be argued that the last decade or two has seen the most significant areas of technological advances, especially in the area of communication. Twenty years ago, communication was primarily limited to letters and phone calls. If you had to send something quicker than a letter, then you might be able to fax it. If you wanted a better option than a telephone for non-written communication, you didn’t have a lot of options.
Well, times have changed dramatically since then. One new innovation which most of us now take for granted is that of conference calls. Conference calling allows whole groups of people to be in on one call, where all parties can hear and speak and have conversation with all others on the call. This ability eliminates the need to have that group all be somewhere in person to talk, which drastically enhances efficiency.
Teleconferencing services are used for many different scenarios, though the primary use is in a business setting. Instead of the traditional face to face meetings, it is now possible to have these meetings in a phone setting. Conference calls can facilitate communication internally within a company, or externally. Some examples of how they are used include team meetings, sales presentations, and training classes.
Although conference calling is used primarily in a business setting, there is a growing use of conference calls for social reasons as well. These social conference calls are sometimes called party line calls, or group calls. In fact, these calls are not always with a defined private group. Sometimes they are public, providing a way to meet other people and socialize.
Like many fairly new technologies, conference calling has its share of technical issues. Most people who have been on at least a few conference calls have run into technical glitches. These are quite often due to a lack of familiarity, whether with the technology or interfaces of conference call programs, or with just the etiquette and protocol of conference calls. Background noises and disturbances are other issues that sometimes cause problems with conference calls. However, perhaps the most common type of problem is simply a lack of bandwidth to support the calls.
Despite the imperfections of the technology, conference calling is a great technological breakthrough we’ve seen in recent years. Although it’s easy to take it for granted, we didn’t have this even just a few years ago.