Cisco Networking Simplified, Second Edition

Chapter . Telepresence

Conferencing Gets Simple

Audioconferencing revolutionized standard meeting practice, but when it was first established, it required a conference operator to admit participants and manage the conference. Conferencing evolved to being easy enough that employees could quickly and easily organize their own conference bridges. (However, we have been in plenty of meetings where the “ease” of today’s conference bridge technology continues to elude some of the brightest engineers.)

VoIP makes conferencing more flexible and cost-effective. Because the VoIP packets are already digital encodings of audio, they can “simply” be routed to a conferencing server, a really fast computer, that can take the digital audio streams, combine them, ...