DISQUS

alexbcory · 1 year ago

Do you work for Lypp? Do you have some other financial arrangement with them? They are a small newcomer to this business and the feature you are touting has been out for some time at other services, so I am confused by your breathless post. I work for Global Conference Partners and always identify this when I am pitching my own service or commenting on someone else's.

We have had an Outlook Add In out since last year that has been downloaded by more than 15,000 people. We offer toll calling at no cost for conferencing (just your own long distance costs) and toll free for 7 cents/min with free recording. We just released moderator controls on InstantConference.com so you can manage whoever is on your call from our website. And we are about to release a texting tool.

We started the business of user managed conferencing in 2001 and are now supporting over a billion minutes a year of calls. We provide the leading service for simple, convenient, and reliable conferencing. I wish Lypp well, and congratulate them on finally adding features that help them bring their feature set closer to the leaders in conferencing.

Ewan · 1 year ago

I've no financial relationship with Lypp and I don't work for them. I just
think it's a genius service :)

elagerway · 1 year ago

Thank you so much Ewan for the write up and recognition of the recent press release announcing our new Outlook Add-in. I would be happy to get on the phone with you to talk about some new features not yet released.

elagerway · 1 year ago

@ alexbcory

I would offer one thing that might help you understand why Ewan might be excited about this service. Lypp was the first commercial conference calling service (in North America at least) that offered scheduled dial-out. Yes, you can use the system as a normal Toll Free conference calling system or you can set your calls up so that everyone in your meeting is called by the system at the time of the meeting, at no extra cost.

As a matter of fact, there are no extra fees whatsoever. Recording & unlimited storage, RSS feeds, Enterprise Account Management (add/edit/remove sub-users) and more, at no extra charge.

Last time I checked, none of the Global Conference Partners services (freeconference.com, instantconference.com etc.) offer automated outbound dialing, but maybe I just missed it.

alexbcory · 1 year ago

Since we offer a free service, we haven't offered outbound dialing yet. But it is on the roadmap for our premium services. If you were first, congratulations.

elagerway · 1 year ago

Considering you have to pay for the long distance to call an RLEC local number I am not sure if I would call it a free service, but I digress there is plenty for everyone.

Let me also say Alex that I can fully appreciate what you have done with GCP and applaud you for swinging back at AT&T (and the like). No one likes to see the incumbent squirm more than I.

I would be Interested in an off-line conversation if you are up for it, erik@lypp.com

alexbcory · 1 year ago

We consider the meal to be free even if you pay your own cabfare to get to the restaurant. Most other conferencing services charge a premium to long distance rates for the conferencing services they provide. And by creating a system that leverages the existing long distance network, we also ensure that users get the premium quality of the voice network vs the much less reliable and lower performing data network used by VoIP and free internet service providers. Since the heart of our business is the SMB market, these characteristics are very critical to meeting their needs. Happy to take this discussion off line. And lastly, we are all needed to continue taking swings at AT&T and the other incumbents who rely on legal and regulatory chicanery to protect their position vs innovating their services...

elagerway · 1 year ago

Agreed, with almost everything.

When using VoIP at the core of a manged network I would argue the service and quality is no different than pure legacy offerings and potentially more redundant and therefore more reliable.

When the connectivity and bandwidth at the edge of the Internet is more reliable Lypp will also be ready for IP phone and softphone interoperability immediately.

IMHO, I believe eventually all conference calls (likely all telephony) will be over IP, but I agree it will take some time to get there.

- Erik | Lypp
http://lypp.com/conference-call-service

alexbcory · 1 year ago

Having tested both head to head and having experience on what happens to both quality and reliability when VoIP legs are introduced, I can tell you there is a substantial and measurable degradation in sound quality and reliability of the connection on the data network. It has much larger swings in loads, suffers greater problems from packet loss and compression, and just hasn't been engineered to voice levels. There will need to be improvement across conferencing hardware, data networks, and carrier operations to overcome these issues. It will take a while to get there. The "free" aspect is no different than it is for voice. You have to pay for a broadband connection to get access to VoIP (and you save the more services you use for this fixed fee). Voice is going the same direction--you pay for access to long distance at a fixed rate and the more service you load on it the better. So for now, the arguments slant heavily to voice, as it can be as free as VoIP and at much higher levels of sound quality and reliability.

Alex

www.freeconference.com
www.instantconference.com

elagerway · 1 year ago

What leg? Lypp does not use VoIP at the edge of the network, hence there is no broadband-based best efforts telephony for any of our clients. My point was that when the connectivity is there we will be ready to deploy an IP solution with relative ease.

As for quality, I will put Lypp up against your services any day of the week. We regularly get customers giving up "free" for Lypp and we have not lost one client yet.

alexbcory · 1 year ago

The problem is that real conference calls include a mix of internet based phone systems, hybrid systems, land lines, speakerphones, and cell phones from domestic and international locations. We are all exposed to problems introduced by the source of the signals we receive. The challenge for conferencing service providers is to take garbage in and make it clean, pure sound. We simply don't control the routes that users go through to get to our services. I am sure the technology to fix these problems and the quality of upstream networks will improve, but there is a different focus for the engineering and development for the voice/PSTN system than for data, so I wouldn't bet on just one route or technology.

I think we all have some attrition and most of it has nothing to do with us. Conferencing services are often used by people with temporary needs, for example (think about someone doing volunteer work with a community organization).

Obviously VoIP is going to be a big part of telephony. It is already a great option to replace land line telephony. And it will get better. But handling very large numbers of inputs that are routed through several networks before they reach a conference bridge is not the current strength of VoIP.

Good luck building your business. We think we have done pretty well by building to over a billion minutes a year, but we are still only 3-4% of the business conferencing marketplace. Clearly there is room for many to succeed. We also believe that there are many consumer applications for "conferencing" that are underserved and we will be releasing products over the next year to address those markets.

elagerway · 1 year ago

Best efforts VoIP calls can lead to a bad experience and the user doesn't necessarily know if it's the bridge or the line. We try and educate our clients as much as we can but the general population still does not get it. That being said we have not lost one conference call customer.

We may be small now but we feel Lypp is in a unique position to grow into a sizable market leader in teleconferencing & web conferencing. By empowering other providers via our Telephony API we are also growing our wholesale business as well.

Good luck to you as well Alex!