As a non-profit organization, every penny counts and a penny spent on administration expenses is a penny you can’t spend on helping the cause of your organization. But communications are important amongst the often loosely formed group of salaried employees and persons contributing their time and assets to aid the organization. So conference calling becomes quite an important tool to being in touch.

Conference calling amongst staff members is a daily event and conference calling to communicate with existing and new contributors is a regular activity. It’s important to project a professional image while at the same time conserving cash.

Many conference companies don’t like to tell you how much anything costs and if you send a staff member to research a potential conferencing supplier, they can spend days trying to get at the real pricing information dealing with all sorts of pesky sales people who forever don’t seem to want to answer your simple questions.

With TurboBridge, we’re up front with our pricing. Flat rate unlimited conference calling at reasonable prices with no gotcha surprise extra charges at the end of the month make TurboBridge a great economical choice.

But if you’re a non-profit, we want to help more, so contact TurboBridge Sales at 1-888-666-3620 or drop us an email (sales@turbobridge.com) to learn about additional discounts for qualified non-profit groups

We’re just back from Paris to attend an event hosted by France Telecom’s Orange division, which provide wireless voice/data services in a variety of countries around the world. France Telecom is promoting and expanding their usage of HD Voice in both their fixed line and mobile entities.

Orange is using AMR-WB as the codec for the mobile handsets and G.722 for for the landlines. Europe uses the GSM radio technology and to conserve bandwidth, voice is today encoded using the GSM codec at a bit rate of typically 13.2 kbps! We’ve all experienced the general poor quality of mobile calls and it would be easy to blame the relatively low transmission speed as the culprit.

AMR-WB (the WB stands for wide band) provide an HD Audio experience and uses only 12.65 kbps! Basically the same as the existing GSM Codec. AMR-WB is newer and fairly sophisticated and older mobile handsets lacked the horsepower to encode and decode voice calls using this codec. Clearly that’s not a concern today. Hence, Orange is rapidly moving forward after a brief trial period.

What did they learn? In surveying their customers, Orange found …

1. Customer’s immediately recognized the better quality experience,
2. Talked longer on the phone
3. Easier to understand and be understood
4. Less stressful than a normal phone call

More importantly, Orange is NOT charging more for HD Audio on mobile, the mobile handsets are the same price as normal and for the Orange network, there’s no increase in bandwidth consumption. It’s a win-win for all!

TurboBridge supports AMR-WB as a beta offering and we’re working with mobile operators to enable them to provide a direct connection to us. As you know, TurboBridge’s main focus is on offering you a better quality audio experience at a better price. We continue to develop our technology, so look to hear more on this topic as the year continues. We’re exciting about the prospects for HD Audio on mobile handsets.

We’re all mobile these days and one of the most frustrating things is trying to dial into a conference bridge while on the the road.  Looking up the number and then trying to dial the conference bridge number and then trying to remember the actual conference ID itself.

At TurboBridge, we thought about that for you and designed our service to be mobile “friendly”. Traditionally audio conference providers ask you to send our your invitation classically “Access Number (800)-555-1212 Conference ID 3848484”.  But this type of invite doesn’t mean anything to your Blackberry.

To enable single dial-in from your Blackberry, be sure to format your invitations as follows:

+1.805.309.2350 x848484#

Where “8484.” is your conference ID. Blackberry sees this as a hyperlink and it enables you to single-click on it. Blackberry will dial the number, pause and send out the conference ID with the “#” as well. As the host you can use a similar format “+1.805.309.2350 x848484*1234#” and have your Blackberry dial and input both the conference ID and host PIN all with one single click.

TurboBridge, we’re working to make things easier for you.