Teleconferencing, but cheaper?

Genghis

At work we have been doing a lot more teleconferencing of late - to the point where the bill for conferencing now exceeds that total cost of calls, broadband and other voice services.

It is absolutely shocking how much it costs.

We are with eircom, and use the usual dial in / caller PIN / organiser PIN service.

I have looked at a couple of other providers following a google yesterday, but none really made any impressions - certainly there was nothing that would slash costs - the one figure I remember was 'just' 18c per minute per particiant - i.e. a 6 person, 90 minute conference would cost €97.20 (with VAT on top too, I'm sure).

So any better value options? Am I right to think Skype can help? If so, how?

Thanks, etc

Iago

depends who you are conferencing in..if it's mostly Irish staff then you might be better off doing it over mobile. I work for Vodafone and there's a business plan called Wireless Office which gives free internal calls between mobiles within the company.

You can conference in up to 6 users on each call, and I think that those people can invite others to join from there. There's no pin number or anything like that but you just dial the users that you want on the call. It's a little different from tradiitional conferencing, but would greatly reduce costs! That way your conference calls would be free if everyone had a mobile, but it may not suit what you're looking for.

conferencing is an expensive business though, I personally wouldn't recommend VoIP but that's a personal preference rather than a technical problem.

Genghis

Thanks Iago, but we do not all have mobiles. All of our conferences are with other people also - if there are more than two of us on the conference, we are ususally in the same room on the same connection.