Q:  I recently had a teleseminar and I thought it went great. Myself and my co-host spoke clearly and slowly leaving pauses in between speaking. Yet the participants who heard us we are hearing us as if our voice were overlapping as if we were both speaking at once or one was jumping in before the other was not finished.

So my question is, is this something that normally happens on a bridge line?  Is there a time delay even though I was finished talking and I could hear he was not interrupting me and vice versa.  What do you advise on this?

When it comes to the bridge line, there are a couple of things to think about.  With the emergence of voice over IP, a lot of people use it a lot to dial in to the bridge.  That can and will cause some problems.  So it depends sometimes on the bridge that you are using and also the phone lines that your callers are dialing in with.  If they are using a VOIP that can cause some problems.  Also a lot of the no cost free bridge lines use voice over IP. If you want to completely eliminate all those types of problems, my suggestion is to move to a paid bridge line.  You are not going to run into any quality issues.  You are not going to run into overlap or anything of that nature when it comes to delivering the audio.

So it is great that there is a lot of bridge lines out there that are free and do not cost anything but just be aware that most of them run on a voice over IP and that is what causes a lot of the problems such as overlap or dropped calls or voice or sound quality issues.  If you move to a paid bridge line, and the one I suggest when you are getting started, is Eagle Conferencing. It is more affordable than most of the others as far as price goes.  The only downside is you have to reserve your conference call ahead of time.

So it is not a bridge line that you have 24-hour access, 7 days a week where you can just pick up the line and dial in. You have to actually reserve a time.  That is the only inconvenience that there is with that bridge line and it is a lot more affordable than some of the others.  When you got a paid bridge line they run on a different type of technology.  It is not run on voice over IP, it is run through regular landlines and that is why they have very few problems when it comes to the types of things that you are experiencing.

For me, when I am doing my calls, if it is an important call, I do not even question it.  I go to a paid bridge just because it is not worth it for me to lose that audio.  It is not worth it for me to have any challenges that way so I always just use my Eagle Conferencing bridge line. Depending on how much you use it, you might be able to split the cost with somebody too where you get one account and perhaps a couple of people use it as long as you are not having multiple calls at the same time.  You might be able to do it that way as well, but my advice is for important calls, go to a paid bridge line.

Tags: bridge, delay, eagle conferencing, line, quality, teleseminar, Teleseminars, time, VOIP