Back in the day, smoke signals were adequate for the North American Indians. They’d control the size and shape of the puffs to indicate different things. In this manner, coherent messages could really be relayed over a distance. But poor visibility or a torrential downpour would make them just about worthless.
Then along came Thomas Graham Bell and his fabulous invention, the telephone. All of a sudden, folks could essentially hear each other over a distance too great to be covered by even the loudest human voice. It converted sound into electrical signals at one end. These signals would then be carried over wire and converted into audio on the other end. In its current incarnation, the phone does this in virtually no time. And now, the appearance of cellular telephone technology and satellite communications means wires are not a constraining factor. But what occurs when a number of folks wish to engage concurrently in conversation using current technology? No, they do not all gather around one phone and scream over the handset so they can be heard. How would they hear the other party? A speaker telephone partly solves that problem if there are just two groups of folk that need to interact. But what if there are far more than 2 groups of people? What if different individuals in multiple locations desire to talk to each other in real-time? Since phones were first designed as a point-to-point strategy, something else needed to be developed.
Audio conferencing takes the traditional phone technology and expands it into a way more flexible communication tool. It does this by permitting 3 or more callers to attach to a meeting bridge. So rather than the telephone call going to a single recipient, it connects to this point which serves as the link point for all the other parties that may be in on the call.
A marginally different example would be audio conferencing within a limited geographical area, say an office building. All calls for parties in the building don’t go out into the bigger telephone system. They are connected thru what is referred to as a PBX or non-public branch exchange. Basically, this is a small phone network for that building. Audio conferencing has been adapted to be used with the web. This is generally known as VoIP or Voice over Web Custom. In this situation, the audio is converted into digital information to be broadcast over the Net. Audio conferencing is a prime example of an easy idea that maximized what was available to become a fact. The phone was a world-changing invention.
Audio conferencing is the connected world striking back. It is the development of a technology into an omnipresent fixture of boardrooms and bedrooms alike. Connecting groups of folks for business and pleasure alike, audio conferencing will doubtless be a fixture from boardrooms to bedrooms.