With the advent of the internet, there are now an increasing number of people who are working outside of office environments and instead are working from their homes, their favorite coffee house, or from the road. As long as people have a laptop and a good internet connection they can work from wherever they happen to be, but this does create a problem and make it difficult for people to collaborate with others. Today, there are more and more companies that use conference call technology to help bring people together, no matter where they are.

No matter where people are in the world, as long as they have telephone access, either through a land line, a cellular phone connection, or a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone, they can participate in conference calls. While it used to be that a teleconference call was difficult and expensive to participate in if you lived across the country, or in a different country, conferencing has changed.

Nowadays, there are quite a few options in long distance phone plans that are flat rated. Many of these not only provide phone coverage for the US, but also throughout Canada for no additional cost. This means that there are more people who can take advantage of conference call sessions and not have to worry about long distance costs.

Many of the international calling rates have also come down considerably thanks to the pioneers in the VoIP telephone services, such as Vonage. Vonage and other similar companies have effectively brought the international long distance rates out of the stratosphere of a dollar or more a minute and into the range of a few cents a minute to and from just about any country. This makes it easy to join in on international conference calls and enjoy making connections with people all around the globe.

The other thing that has made it easy for people to participate in conference calls are the free VoIP phone services like Skype, which is free when calling other Skype users. More and more often people are arranging to have audio teleconferencing meetings by using Skype exclusively; therefore eliminating all costs for all participants.

For those who don't have the option of having conference calls with only people calling in from Skype, there are other free VoIP services, such as VoIPCheap and Gizmo. While there are some disadvantages to using these kinds of services, and you might need to jump through a couple of "hoops" to make the connections, these can be really great solutions for staying connected to others through teleconferencing.

Simple audio teleconferencing used to be the only option that people had for conference call meetings. These are the types of teleconference sessions that only utilize the phone. However, today there are some additional options that can be used to make conferencing even more effective, such as video teleconferencing and web conferencing, which bring added features and benefits, while keeping people connected no matter where they happen to be.