Travel Technology - International conference calling

Hi

I am needing to set up a few international conference calls between myself in London and several others in Australia and in India/China and possibley Costa Rica.

Has anyone used an international conferencing service and if so do you know of a good audio conferencing service for this preferabley with local dial in for those countries. As the cost is coming out of my pocket I would prefer to keep costs down, ordinarily I use my work conferencing system but this is my own project so would rather not use work.

Thanks

Have you looked at Skype? If the others also have it, the cost will be free. If you need to call landlines using Skype credit, the cost is still quite reasonable. I've used Skype for calling to/from a number of overseas locations with no problems. I've also used it for conference calls with 4 or 5 people in the US and suspect it would work decently for overseas conference calling.

Wirelessly posted (Blackberry 8800: BlackBerry8800/4.2.1 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/179)

Thanks rts123, I had considered skype, which I use when I call home etc but have heard bad things about skype when using the free internet to internet service. To be honest I also didn't know you could conference on skype.how is the dropout rate on skype when the participants are all calling over the net? Thanks

I've used skype for calls between London, Buenos Aires, Germany, USA and JP. Worked pretty well, you DO have to work with the latency and lack of full group duplex a bit though if everyone wants to speak at the same time.

We use a company called intercall. I have no idea on the costs, but I suppose anything is cheaper than AT&T which we previously used.

They have national toll-free dial in numbers for most countries, and have local access numbers for a few major metropolitan areas (NY & London are ones that I'm specifically aware of).

The feature set seems rich (recording, muting, typical conference leader functions, as well as the ability to integrate with webex).

All in all, I've been pretty satisfied, though of late, it seems I've gotten a few "all circuits are busy" errors when trying to dial in for meetings.

Web Ex covers a number of these countries (Australia, India, and China).

If you can't find one company that has all the numbers you want, you can always buy a foreign number and forward it to a US number (the cheapest forward)> I buy my foreign numbers for my Asterisks server from didww.com which has good quality lines and very good forwarding capacity. I can get numbers from many countries there. Costa Rica isn't listed and based on my knowledge of VOIP is a country that generally protects it phone company from foreign competition. In Dubai, this has stopped many of the web conferencing companies from setting up shop. The State simply demanded an outrageous fee for lines which were being run out of the country. China, India, Australia, are all easy. Costa Rica will be your problem.

A good non-IP solution is www.budgetconferencing.com

Thanks everyone for the help, in the end I used Accuconference (http://www.accuconference.com) it seems pretty good and a 50 minute call with three people only cost £10 which seems pretty reasonable to me.

Thanks everyone for the help, in the end I used Accuconference (http://www.accuconference.com) it seems pretty good and a 50 minute call with three people only cost £10 which seems pretty reasonable to me.
I like the services provided by the various Accu companies.
If you need fewer than 20 participants and don't need an operator, toll-free dial-in, or dial-out services, then you can use their free accudial.net service.