Ahmad Masrieh, the business development and IT manager at Lindenbaum, describes in an interview the ideas behind the intercontinental conferencing system from Lindenbaum. His summary: The quality of a conference call is measured by the ability of its participants to conduct their work without them noticing the technology behind it.

Lindenbaum has developed a geographically-distributed, intercontinental conferencing system for one of its customers.
What were the ideas behind its development?
When holding a small conference call with our families on holiday, we are willing to accept some inconvenience and are glad that it costs nothing to give our parents a wave. When it comes to business we have greater requirements: Partners have a busy schedule and should not have to wait around for the conference to start. Each participant must be made to feel welcome, so access should be easy and should not involve any complicated instructions for other countries. And last but not least the conference should guarantee high voice quality. Particularly when you don't know your business partner personally, there should be no potential for misunderstanding and conversation should flow freely. 

And what does Lindenbaum offer?
We design ready-to-use, geographically-distributed, intercontinental conferencing systems. We supply both the hardware and the software. In the current project we also developed our own software solution for E1-T1 conversion, which is required for calls to the USA, which avoids the need for the upstream installation of special converters as is commonly the case. We also provide local expertise on different network standards, regardless of their location. 
 
Which network standards are used in your system?
VoIP offers immense benefits and will revolutionise telephony in the future, but at present our networks do not provide the required bandwidth to ensure continuously high quality calls. In the worst case individual may only have 1 kbyte per second available. Thus we use an anachronous system that, to date, cannot be matched by VoIP in terms of voice quality: Time Division Multiplex, abbreviated as TDM, is a method of simultaneously transmiting several signals.

So does Lindenbaum believe that there is no need to change?
No, not at all. However, because we currently find ourselves in a transition phase in terms of telephony quality, and will continue to do so for some years, Lindenbaum provides a hybrid conference system that supports both the TDM and VoIP standards. We are looking forward to the new opportunities created by IP as soon as the technology has matured.

What does this mean for your customers?
Operators and end-users perceive our dynamically-scalable, virtual conferencing system as a single, large virtual system, regardless of the number of systems they actually use or whether it is a small or large conference call with several hundred participants. At the same time handling is kept simple and convenient. At Lindenbaum, the conference access codes are identical for participants at all locations, whether they are situated in Berlin, New York, Paris or Moscow. It is irrelevant to the service employees from which country the caller accesses the platform, all processes are administered using the same, uniform and convenient interface - the Lindenbaum Operator Call Center. What matters most to our customers is that the intercontinental connection is made. The conference system works. Now they can turn to the important business matters at hand.