At the End, it’s the Good Old Telephone Conference

I just came back from Tel Aviv. In way, Tel Aviv is a city made for the virtual worker. All (repeat: all) coffee shops, beach bars, etc. have a free WLAN. In most places, you would find several of them to choose from. So, on Tuesday afternoon, I was doing some shopping at Dizzengoff and stopped from time to time to have a coffee and a email (or a short Skype chat with the Philippines, Austria, Slovakia). Remember, although I have a mobile phone with WLAN capacity, I rarely use this functionality. And I still don’t have a BlackBerry. But I do carry my 1,5 kg 13″ notebook wih me all the time.

However, in some places the WLAN sucked. Particularly where I needed it for Voice-over-IP. In my hotel, I was never able to have an uninterrupted conversion-over-IP for longer than 5 minutes. So, when I had to set up a telephone conference with a new client and a partner, I relied on a technology which is there for more than a century: good old telephone. After some search, I choose aitelephone, which has a long list of 63 local access, toll-free numbers. They also have the option of dialling out to more than 200 countries.  The prices are moderate. If I am not mistaken, we will pay 13 US$ for a half hour conference of three parties, as you just pay for the connection time you use. It worked just fine, good transmission, on interruption. So, as long as all voce-over-IP systems are as unreliable as they are in the moment, I will use classical telephone conferences for mission critical conversations.