Did you ever imagine that you could actually talk to more than one person using your phone? Well, conference calls allow you to. This means you and your friends can communicate from different places at the same time, and even listen to each others voice without having to put one on hold. Now with the invention of video conference you can even look at each other while talking.

Telephone conference:

A conference call is a telephone call where you can have more than one person listen in to the audio portion of the call. This is so designed that you can also talk during the call, or the call can be set up so that the person you called merely listens in to the call but cannot speak.

Conference calling can be very useful for remote business meetings. To use conference calling, your network needs to be able to provide this service, and your phone should be able to support it. You may also have to add this service to your subscription. In conference calls you can call the people you want to talk to and add them to the call. In some cases the participants call in to the conference calls either by dialing a conference bridge, which is a special kind of telephone that can take multiple calls, or you can do so by using a special telephone number set up for this purpose. This is a very good way of socializing, as you get to meet a lot of new people. Conference calls are mainly used by businesses. By paying some extra charges, you can avail a three-way calling service where you can add a second outgoing call to a call already connected at the same number.

Video conference:

Video conference is one of the greatest achievements of telecommunication technology. This allows two or more locations to communicate via two-way video and audio transmissions simultaneously. It is called visual collaboration and is a special type of groupware.

The technology behind this is digital compression of audio and video streams in real time. Codec which is coder/decoder performs the compression. Up to 1:500 compression rates can be achieved. The resulting digital form of 1's and 0's is then further subdivided, and then transmitted through some network like ISDN or IP. Audio modems are used in the transmission line that uses POTS or the plain telephony network in video telephony, as it converts the digital pulses to or from analog waves in the audio spectrum range.

The other components which are needed for video conference are: