How Cloud Communication can Lower the Cost of Conference Call
In India, many companies have workers in different cities. Even more importantly the number of such companies is growing. So, a company that has a head office in Mumbai may have regional offices in Bangalore and Ahmadabad. Complicating factors further is the possibility that workers in all three cities may need to collaborate with each other for several hours a day. Such a scenario is not just plausible, but rather a regular occurrence.
A company whose workers need to regularly collaborate but who nevertheless are in distant locations must use cloud telephony. This is because employees in one office may have expertise in marketing and understand a client needs well while those in another office may have expertise in budgeting and understand the company’s internal processes well. It’s likely that only by bringing together these employees can a company add value to its clients. Today the most economical way to this is by using cloud communications or VoIP.
Before cloud communications or VoIP was commonplace a company with employees in distant offices may have had little choice but to use teleconferencing if it wanted its workers to collaborate regularly. This was expensive and very inefficient as well; it was certainly one reason why most small companies then choose to house all workers under one roof. It was also a key reason why small companies couldn’t grow i.e. they couldn’t hire the best talent which was often disbursed across India. Because many talented people in smaller towns couldn’t afford to live in large cities where employment opportunities were greater, their talent remained out of the reach of small companies.
Put bluntly, cloud communications lower the cost of communication. Before it emerged, only established companies could regularly hold teleconferences and video conferences between its employees and between its employees and workers in other companies.
Of course, as everyone who uses a phone knows, long distance calls are more expensive than local calls. So, when people in Tokyo, London, Dubai, and Bangalore need to get on a single conference call the cost can be significant. When such people need to communicate with each other regularly the costs can be too much to bear. Cloud communications make conferences between people living in distant cities relatively affordable, so much so that even small entities today regularly hold teleconferences.
Today video conferencing which earlier could only be regularly done by large entities is available to smaller entities. A key reason for this is that calling can now happen over the internet or cloud telephone system, not over traditional phone systems (PSTN). The internet can transmit far more information than a traditional phone system can; the magnitude of the amount of data that can be carried over the internet is several times that possible using PSTN. Hence because so much data can be carried over a single connection the cost of calling has fallen dramatically.
Technically VoIP possible because when a caller speaks over a microphone the audio signal is digitised by the VoIP application being used after which data is broken into pieces called packets. Every packet of data travel over the internet to the recipient. Upon arrival at the recipient the data is put back in the correct order allowing the recipient to hear what was said. It’s important to note that data packets sent over the internet don’t necessarily arrive in the order they were sent. This is because VoIP ensures data is routed using the most efficient route.
During a conference call people from more than one office speak to each other; it’s also common for them to see each other during a call if they choose to do video conferencing. Just like a regular call between New Delhi and Mumbai will cost more than a call within Delhi, so too is a conference call between two distant locations more costly than a call between two nearby locations. However, because the cloud is ubiquitous, it has rendered distances immaterial. This makes it extremely affordable to do a conference call over the cloud. Both parties, who talk to each other over the cloud, are connected to the cloud making distances between them less relevant. Of course, this doesn't mean that conference calls over the cloud are free, often they’re not, but they are far cheaper than calling over PSTN.
Calling rates in India are a fraction of what they had been a few short years ago because of the cloud. Without this technology, most households would still be paying thousands of rupees as their mobile phone bill instead of the few hundred they likely pay today. Today when entities large or small need to get a few people on a conference call, they never have to think twice about doing so. This is sole because of the power of the cloud which has made communications so must cheaper, faster, and practical.
