Today, many telephone services allow users to use a "conference calling" feature to connect up to three parties. Some business telephone systems allow teleconferences of six or more calling parties with varying degrees of quality. Audio conferencing goes well beyond these forms of telephone conference calling in capacity, features and quality.

What is Audio Conferencing?
Audio conferencing (also called "teleconferencing") means communicating over a telephone line with three or more participants.

Capacity of audio conferencing systems can be hundreds of callers on a single conference call. While most business, education and government audio conferences take place with less than twenty callers, there are some unique applications that require far more capacity. For example, Wall Street conference calls to announce earnings, products and management changes are typically served by very high capacity systems with hundreds of callers listening in.

Audio Conferencing Features
Features of audio conference systems vary widely, however, all offer more capability than typical office phone systems. For example, in a conference call of more than just a few callers, it is typical that one or more callers is hard to hear. Audio conferencing systems and service providers can usually adjust the audio volume, or gain, of any individual caller to more closely match the audio levels of other callers. This can make all the difference in success or failure of a teleconference call. Further, special features such as requests for an operator, breakout groups and custom billing are common.

Quality Factor
Audio quality is a key factor in the success of teleconferencing. In fact, if audio quality is poor, the primary objective of the call can be lost. Nearly all modern audio conferencing systems have important capabilities including echo cancellation and automatic gain control that are not available on most telephone systems. Moreover, most commercial telephone systems are not engineered to link multiple callers. So, while it may seem that simply pushing the "conference" button on several telephones to add additional callers will do the job, in fact audio quality of teleconferences pieced together this way can be quite poor.

TKO Video Communications
TKO also provides video conferencing equipment Sony, Tandberg and Polycom), outsourcing and event management including satellite broadcasting and both video and audio streaming. In addition, we offer telecommunications and video conference training.

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