Category: Technology

New Web Conferencing Partner

TurboBridge is focused on providing high quality audio conferencing services. Businesses use audio conferencing all day long to connect their customers, employees and suppliers and our goal is to provide an easy to use affordable service. TurboBridge was designed as a web service, hence we provide you all the tools necessary to manage your account and conferences online and make changes at any time, with no need to contact us for assistance.

We often get customer inquiries about whether TurboBridge offers web conferencing. The short answer is we don’t. The longer answer is we do! In addition to our retail services, TurboBridge provides wholesale audio conferencing services to a number of other companies who integrate our conferencing with their other solutions.

We’re pleased to announce that join.me, a provider of web conferencing, uses TurboBridge for the audio conferencing portion of their service. Join.me is a service offered by the well known LogMeIn company. Join.me has developed a very innovative web conferencing collaboration service with many of the same attributes of TurboBridge. Mainly, join.me is a simple easy to use web conferencing service. It’s easy to set up or schedule a conference, easy for your participants to join and easy for the presenter to present. There’s much to recommend about join.me when compared to the older traditional web collaboration services which often required everyone to download a big application and offered numerous features that were difficult to use.

But we left the best part for last. The basic join.me service is FREE.

Yes, free, it’s easy to sign-up at http://join.me and includes free toll conferencing as well (powered by TurboBridge).  Look for join.me to expand their offering with additional services for a small monthly fee but their intent is for the basic service to remain free. There’s no reason not to try this fantastic service today!

A drifting clock?

TurboBridge is a unique in that we allow basically any VoIP device to connect to us. That’s pretty straightforward. For a typical conference call, we have to mix n’ match the audio streams coming from a variety IP devices. That’s not straighforward and while they all may ‘speak’ VoIP, sometimes they don’t all speak it at the right time.

It’s something called clock synchronization, it’s terribly boring and it’s something special we do at TurboBridge to ensure you have the highest possible audio quality.

The ‘clock’ is the heartbeat or metronome to any network and telephone companies have long used highly accurate ‘clocks’ to ensure that all the components were singing to the same beat. Unfortunately, in the disconnected world of the Internet, there is no common clock. A bad clock can mean missing beats and lost audio.

When a VoIP conference call starts, each parties VoIP equipment starts their clock at the same time so that the audio can begin. However, not all clocks are as well made as others and sometimes during a single phone call, one of the participant’s clocks begin to lose or gain time, this is known in the VoIP world as ‘clock drift’. This ‘bad’ clock at some point realizes it’s not 100% in sync with the rest and makes a quick time adjustment — and when it does you likely will hear a brief click as your VoIP device re calibrates itself.  Unfortunately, when this re calibration happens every minute or two, it gets quite annoying.

At TurboBridge, we recognize that all VoIP devices aren’t created equal and using some special sauce, we continuously monitor the VoIP devices on a conference bridge and automatically police the ‘bad’ clocks so you don’t hear any annoying clicks.  It’s just one of the small things we do at TurboBridge to make your audio experience better.