I find that lately one of my pet peeves has been talking on conference calls. It’s part of my daily job to communicate with colleagues in different offices, and a lot of time we use an audio conference bridge to talk. One of the biggest annoyance I find that it of course overall poor audio quality, and we spend much of our time in these meetings to figure out how to correct the problem. Effectively the first 10 minutes of each conference call becomes a witch hunt to find who has the cheapest PC speakers or microphones. It’s not even we have participants calling in from cell phones but rather all parties are calling from some form of “fixed line”. Unfortunately poor softphones, cheap long distance, and cell phones are all contributing to poor echo cancellation – and when you add a bunch of callers to the mix who join late, a 30-minute conference call may end up being only a 15-minute affair because you’ll have to correct echo every time someone joins.
I do admit that I am occasionally guilty of the punctual part – so that’s going to be my new year’s resolution to correct this issue.
I would love to cancel my landline, and if it were not because of the audio quality I would be saving a few bucks every month.
