Conference Bridge Colocation a Lower Cost Alternative to Hosted Conference Calls

Looking to implement a conference bridge but don’t have the infrastructure in house to handle the traffic? Colocating a conference bridge to a central office or data center can provide you with tons of bandwidth or TDM type circuits for a lot less then bring in circuits to your office. A colocation center is a type of data center or carrier hotel where different companies can set up servers, telecommunications equipment or network gear at central location. These colocation centers are set up like your local central office with lots of fiber, redundancy, fail over, battery back up and power generation to keep mission critical servers up and running. The pricing trade off , when deciding if colocation is good for your application, is monthly rack space rental versus loop fee. The loop fee is the monthly reoccurring cost that your phone company is going to charge to bring a T1/PRI or DS3 type circuit into your office. A loop fee can run around or over $ 300.00 per month for a typical T1. Rack space can run slightly less for a 4 U server. When considering a larger application with multiple circuits lo-location becomes more affordable.

We recently looked at Broadvox for a customer who wanted to implement a 500 port conference call system. When comparing the pricing of a DS3 circuit delivered to the customer’s location versus a co-location the cost was overwhelmingly in favor of co-location. The savings was around 40% of the overall monthly reoccurring charges.

Other advantages of colocating your conference bridge can be security and geo location. Having a conference bridge located in Dallas in a colocation center might prove a safer location then having one located near Gulf of Mexico in Houston.

Many hosted conference call providers us the same model when setting up a large conference solution. For more information of conferencing or implementing an in house audio conference bridge check out www.conference-bridge.net or call 800-335-0229

From the Desk of Ricardo Trinidad

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