NA conference phone tech question

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Final Approach
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San_Diego_Pilot
Quick Q if anyone knows. I Googled but couldn't get past all the clickbait "10 conference call mistakes to avoid, number 6 will shock you"

If you dial in from a personal phone to a conference number.. is there a way for the conference organizer to know who is muting their phone or not? Or is the mute function purely internal to your phone?

I know on Skype for business, G2M, and internally on our system we can see who is muting or not.. but if you are dialing in from your landline or mobile is there a way to know who is muted?
 
No. There’s no way across the PSTN to see any feature used on a remote phone.

In the case of a private SIP phone on a company network, there can be a way to see remote buttonology, but it’s not usually exposed to the conference chair. Sometimes it is.

Some conference systems have the ability for the chair to mute lines at the conference system of anyone on the call for noise problems and they’d be able to see that status.

That’s done at the line level not the device level. The audio is still being sent from the device, the conference bridge is simply ignoring it.
 
No. There’s no way across the PSTN to see any feature used on a remote phone.
Awesome, thanks! That's what I thought but wanted to confirm. I was hoping / expecting that you'd see the thread and chime in since you're the resident network expert!!

We have some conference calls at work sometimes where the call quality is suspect.. we have SIP phones but some people call in from personal phones. We request everyone to mute, but inevitably you can hear people fidgeting, echo, etc. So I was curious if there was a way to actually see who was and was not muting

We've been using Skype for business more and on that any presenter can mute attendees
 
Awesome, thanks! That's what I thought but wanted to confirm. I was hoping / expecting that you'd see the thread and chime in since you're the resident network expert!!

We have some conference calls at work sometimes where the call quality is suspect.. we have SIP phones but some people call in from personal phones. We request everyone to mute, but inevitably you can hear people fidgeting, echo, etc. So I was curious if there was a way to actually see who was and was not muting

We've been using Skype for business more and on that any presenter can mute attendees

Yeah nope. And noisy people in conference calls was always the problem even in the analog days. Back then you could hit *0 and get this archaic thing called an “Operator” to come online and ask what you needed and who could look and see which line was holding the “talk slot”.

Conference bridges cheat. You mix the two loudest lines and mute all the others and the next loudest steals the talk slot from the quietest talker. It makes it sound to the human ear like the lines are all mixed all the time, but they’re not. Saves on DSP processing power to have a ‘two-talker plus an interrupter’ algorithm.

Some conference bridges can expose the talk slot numbers to the chairperson on a web interface but that’s not super-common. Mostly used in financial services conference calls with hundreds of people, and watched by a specialty person who’s job is to keep the noise down, if they don’t just mute everyone and have them press touch-tones to queue up in a list for questions for the moderators.

The best way to handle really large unattended (as in calls with nobody monitoring call quality and actively managing things or an operator), is to have the moderator mute EVERYONE but themselves with the moderator commands at the start and then make an announcement to everyone about what touch-tones to press to self-unmute their individual line if they need to say something. Not all bridges have that functionality, though.

And THEN you get the female moderator with the squeaky voice who’s voice false trips the “mute all” command because the bridge thinks their voice hits the correct frequencies for touch-tones, and the bridge maker made the mute all command a double press of the same key... (if you make all commands a two key sequence non-repeated, the level of false commands from voices and noises drops to near zero, but double presses of a single touch tone will always hit on someone’s voice, eventually...) — oh how much fun I had explaining that problem to AT&T who chose “##” as their “mute all” command for moderators when they signed a huge conferencing contract and one squeaky voiced lady’s voice spewed “# # # # #” in the DTMF detector logs constantly while she talked. Hahahaha.
 
By the way, early conference bridges DID mix all lines or a lot more of them simultaneously. It was incorrectly thought that it would sound more”natural”. It turned out after the industry studied it for a while that we (obviously) realized that two people might talk and interrupt each other in a heated debate but three in the mix added no value to that.

Our company’s first all digital bridge back then did four and that took a massive AT&T DSP chip that cost hundreds of dollars back then. Heh.

The marketing demo was to have people call into a conference on an 800 number and have a barbershop quartet on four different phone lines, sing a song.

No bridge out there will do that today. :)
 
how much fun I had explaining that problem to AT&T who chose “##” as their “mute all” command for moderators when they signed a huge conferencing contract and one squeaky voiced lady’s voice spewed “# # # # #” in the DTMF detector logs constantly while she talked
:lol:

I'm sure you've seen this?
 
I love it when someone puts the conference call on hold instead of mute. Then everyone gets to listen to their "Smooth Jazz" royalty-free hold music.
 
Hilarious one time about 5 years ago when we had global biweekly calls with about 50 people. We heard a toilet flush on the line. Someone forgot to mute it. Our management wasn’t stuffy enough to worry about it, and everyone got a good laugh. We figured it was a European toilet by the foreign sound of the flush.
 
I enjoy it more when you're on an international call with people who don't speak English particularly well, so the requests for people to "mute your phones" go unheeded while there are children yelling in the background and the television blaring.
 
I love it when someone puts the conference call on hold instead of mute. Then everyone gets to listen to their "Smooth Jazz" royalty-free hold music.

Oh gawd. It’s funny you should mention that.

Right after we lost the battle to have silent hold on our phone system, most people had FINALLY stopped using the various “free” conference call services when we kept pointing out the new expensive phone system had a conferencing bridge built in.

Guess what people started doing? Hold button instead of mute button. Or taking a call on their second line forgetting that hold now plays the crappy music the call center wanted...

Beat. Head. Here.

By the way, if you feed a digital conference bridge fed with old D4/AMI T1 circuits instead of ESF... the telecom geeks will know what that is...

And you put all 24 phone lines from that T1 into the same conference call. Or an even bigger, say any denomination of 24 up to the maximum capacity of your bridge... or linked bridges...

You see, non-ESF (SuperFrame vs Extended Superframe) uses “robbed bit” alarm signaling. One bit of the audio path is stolen every so often and ignored in the audio to send or receive remote alarms on the circuit.

So if you put all the exact same *sound* and a sound with a high amount of musical or other pitches with harmonica that ring on all of those channels...

You’ll set the second most significant bit across all of the channels for long enough to trigger a remote Yellow Alarm on that T1.

And... when you do that to hundreds of phone lines across multiple tens of T1 circuits at the same time...

You can crash the Cheyenne, WY MCI central office switch. Multiple times. In a single weekend.

Nobody could figure out why large chunks of a multi-hundred line conference call kept dropping simultaneously on that multi-bridge system until I put all of the lines on music hold during testing one Saturday during down-time testing to find the problem, and then thought “Hey, I think I know what’s happening here...”

To prove it, I manually dialed hundreds of lines back in and then injured only the operator line and whistled into the operator headset.

240 lines dropped instantly and then a pager message got me to call the on call engineer that weekend,

“You guy’s doing anything to those MCI circuits out of Cheyenne?”

“Just that span drop root cause testing they were asking for, why?”

“You crashed the MCI switch. They’re kinda ****ed at us.”

:) :) :) Ahh the bad old days. :) :) :)

Yes. I said MCI and pager. It was that long ago. Hahaha.
 
By the way my favorite “background noise” story after literally hundreds of them in that biz, was the AT&T Senior Director of CONFERENCING who regularly fell asleep on overnight maintenance conference calls to fix thousands and thousands of conferencing ports and systems or maintain them.

He snores. We all knew it was him. We were a vendor to AT&T. You don’t bark at a Senior Director to wake up and stop snoring. We’d just let it go for a while if we were not needing to say much, and then one of the other AT&T managers in the call would mute their bridge line and call his cell. We’d all hear it ring, the snoring stop, a muffled conversation where his subordinate woke him up, and he’d say “Alright, what’s the current status, I was away!” into the conference EVERY time. LOL.

Liked the guy. It was damned hilarious.

“We are on step 27 of the MOP.”

“Thanks! So we’ve done the risky step at 24 and 25 and those went well?”

“Yup. Just waiting on database indexing now, and then a fail over test to the other Sun server.”

“Great, thanks.”

Now what also made this really funny was he had multiple cockatiels. They chirped and jabbered all the time. Whenever he was awake he would mute his bridge line. But somehow he always fell asleep with it unmuted.

The conference call sounded like some jungle scene with tropical birds and heavy snoring until we woke him up. Every. Single. Maintenance. Window. LOL!

The other repetitive funny was at a different company doing all Linux work years later. Our Senior Linux guy could not STAND indecisive stupidity on conference calls. If managers started hemming and hawing about whether or not a particularly risky troubleshooting step or repair step should be done during a massive system outage (that triggered the conference call in the first place), he’d simply announce, “You people can’t make decisions so I’m hanging up now and fixing this. I’ll send an email when I’m done.”

He hung up on every major outage call I was ever on for two years until we found a few managers who could make tech decisions. It was the most hilarious thing I’ve ever heard. Any other outage calm that big with no decisions being made, us techs would just start a chat room and figure out the plan ourselves and do it, but we didn’t hang up on their silly useless management call. We even had a secret tech bridge number where we’d announce into the big call, mute that line, and then talk the problem through on the other bridge on a second phone.

But the senior architect wouldn’t stand for it or play that game. He’d just announce he was leaving, and go fix it. LOL.
 
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