Background

Conference calls are a common tool in the business environment today. They seamlessly close any geographic distance between the participants. While participating in a conference call you are usually not aware of the physical location and time zone of all other participants. This is true until you find it hard to understand the flow of the call due to some degradation in audio quality. As a result, one of the main requests we hear from IT managers is the need to effectively address complains they get from their users on the quality of the conference calls.

Source of Quality Degradation

One of the main reasons there is a quality degradation is the appearance of some sort of noise during the call. This can happen in many scenarios, few of them are described below.

One of the participants in the call is located in a noisy environment but he/she has to talk and therefore can not mute his/her phone. Moreover, in some cases the mute option is not easily accessed or is simply ignored.

Talking from a noisy environment

Another scenario is that one of the participant is disturbed by other tasks and puts the conference call line “on hold”. As a result “music on hold” is heard for all other participants in the call.

Multitask during a call

And, of course, there are always the sporadic noises that appear from time to time like slamming the door of the conference room.

Door Slam

Any of the above scenarios, and many more, will cause disturbance to all participants in the call. The more participants are there in the call, the higher the chance of encountering disturbance to audio quality.

Required Solution

To begin with, you should provide proper guidance to the participants in order to minimize these cases. In the rest of this post we will discuss how the technology can help you to better handle the above mentioned scenarios. We should distinguish between two types of disturbances: sporadic ones like slamming of a door and continues ones like street noise and music on hold.

Sporadic disturbance is very difficult to monitor & manually control. Due to its temporal nature, the only effective technical solution is to have an audio filter that in real-time attenuates this noise.

The same as with sporadic disturbance, continuous disturbance, should also be attenuated in real-time. In addition, a real-time alert should be flagged in order to enable an external intervention – manual or automatic one. For example such an alert might enable the operator to take control over the disturbing audio port.

PBXMate

PBXMate, is a software product that is equipped with the latest technology to help you take control of your conference bridge. It has sophisticated monitoring capabilities that can provide you with real-time alerts, including visual ones, on quality degradation.

Real time quality alerts

A detailed identification (like SIP Call ID) is available to allow quick tracing of the disturbing audio port.

The PBXMate is equipped with sophisticated noise reduction filters, including a powerful user specific noise reduction.

And finally, the PBXMate has seamless integration capabilities with VoIP networks that supports the SIP standard.