 | |
Type of site | Teleconferencing |
|---|---|
| Owner | David Erickson |
| URL | freeconferencecall |
| Commercial | Yes |
| Launched | October 26, 2001 |
FreeConferenceCall.com is a website founded in 2001 in Long Beach, California. The company is one of the largest providers of conference call services online.
The domain FreeConferenceCall.com was registered with GoDaddy on October 26, 2001, for $10 by David Erickson, founder and CEO of the Long Beach, California-based company. [1] [2] [3] Erickson's original plan was only to offer freeware and then promote additional services at a cost. [3] For the first few years since the website founding, Erickson was the only employee, performing all website coding, customer relations, and marketing functions. [4]
Beginning in 2005, the company formally generated revenue by entering into profit-sharing agreements with local exchange carriers (LECs) in rural areas located in the Midwestern United States, such as Farmers Telephone based in Riceville, Iowa. [3] [5] The LECs were permitted to charge interexchange carriers such as AT&T Wireless, Verizon Communications, and Sprint to connect incoming calls to conference call numbers and would split the revenue generated from this increased traffic with FreeConferenceCall.com. [3] [6] [7] With the explosion of the first free conference provider post 9/11, rural LECS were receiving hundreds of millions of minutes per month. That led to March 2007, several long-distance service providers began blocking access to these phone numbers alleging that the local exchanges were violating several laws and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) guidelines. [3] [8] [9] [10] However by May 2007, "the blocking largely ceased after a stern prod by the Federal Communications Commission", according to the Associated Press . [7] In June 2007, the FCC formally barred the interexchange carriers from blocking conference calls. [3] FreeConferenceCall.com's business model was later indirectly regulated when the FCC enacted the Connect America Fund in 2012, ending the exemption for telephone companies in rural areas and requiring the LECs to operate like any other U.S. telephone company. [11]
The FreeConferenceCall.com hold music, "Sunshine Soul" by "New York Jazz Ensemble", was licensed with Warner Chappell Production Music in 2004 and has remained the same throughout the company's history. In the late 2000s, the company tried to change the music but under intense backlash from users instead decided to offer the option to change it to a song of the customer's choice. "Sunshine Soul" has been the subject of several remixes and parodies on YouTube and SoundCloud. [12]
FreeConferenceCall.com started "Santa's Hotline", a toll-free telephone line where children can call to leave a message for Santa Claus. [13] The phone line was opened in 2010 but went viral on social media in 2015 after it was mentioned on Fox Business. During that year, the company said it received calls with nine million messages from children leaving their holiday gift wish lists. [14] The phone number remains active with alternate numbers in several countries and languages. [15]
By September 2011, FreeConferenceCall.com employed 60 people and was responsible for 20 million calls per month. [16] That year FreeConferenceCall.com moved to a one-story building, its current 10,000-square-foot headquarters, located on Long Beach Traffic Circle. [4] [17]
As of 2016, the company employs more than 150 people and, in September of that year, opened satellite offices in Signal Hill, California, to accommodate its customer service staff of about 45 people. [18]
Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS) was an analog mobile phone system standard originally developed by Bell Labs and later modified in a cooperative effort between Bell Labs and Motorola. It was officially introduced in the Americas on October 13, 1983, and was deployed in many other countries too, including Israel in 1986, Australia in 1987, Singapore in 1988, and Pakistan in 1990. It was the primary analog mobile phone system in North America through the 1980s and into the 2000s. As of February 18, 2008, carriers in the United States were no longer required to support AMPS and companies such as AT&T and Verizon Communications have discontinued this service permanently. AMPS was discontinued in Australia in September 2000, in Pakistan by October 2004, in Israel by January 2010, and Brazil by 2010.
Local exchange carrier (LEC) is a regulatory term in telecommunications for the local telephone company.
Caller identification is a telephone service, available in analog and digital telephone systems, including voice over IP (VoIP), that transmits a caller's telephone number to the called party's telephone equipment when the call is being set up. The caller ID service may include the transmission of a name associated with the calling telephone number, in a service called Calling Name Presentation (CNAM). The service was first defined in 1993 in International Telecommunication Union – Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) Recommendation Q.731.3.
An interexchange carrier (IXC), in U.S. legal and regulatory terminology, is a type of telecommunication company, commonly called a long-distance telephone company. It is defined as any carrier that provides services across multiple local access and transport areas (interLATA). Calls made on telephone circuits within the local geographic area covered by one local network are handled only by that intraLATA carrier, commonly called a local telephone exchange carrier. Local calls are usually defined by connections made without additional charge whether the connected call is in the same LATA or connects to another LATA with no charge. IntraLATA usually refers to rated or toll calls between LATA within state boundaries, as opposed to interstate, or calls between LATAs in different states.
BellSouth, LLC was an American telecommunications holding company based in Atlanta, Georgia. BellSouth was one of the seven original Regional Bell Operating Companies after the U.S. Department of Justice forced the American Telephone & Telegraph Company to divest itself of its regional telephone companies on January 1, 1984.
Telephone slamming is an illegal telecommunications practice, in which a subscriber's telephone service is changed without their consent. Slamming became a more visible issue after the deregulation of the telecommunications industry in the mid-1980s, especially after several price wars between the major telecommunications companies. The term slamming was coined by Mick Ahearn, who was a consumer marketing manager at AT&T in September 1987. The inspiration for the term came from the ease at which a competitor could switch a customer's service away from AT&T by falsely notifying a telephone company that an AT&T customer had elected to switch to their service. This process gave AT&T's competitors a "slam dunk" method for the unauthorized switching of a customer's long-distance service. The term slamming became an industry standard term for this practice.
A conference call is a telephone call in which someone talks to several people at the same time. The conference call may be designed to allow the called party to participate during the call or set up so that the called party merely listens into the call and cannot speak.
AT&T Mobility LLC, also known as AT&T Wireless and marketed as simply AT&T, is an American telecommunications company. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of AT&T Inc. and provides wireless services in the United States. AT&T Mobility is the largest wireless carrier in the United States, with 217.4 million subscribers at the end of Q4 2022.
AT&T Wireless Services, formerly part of AT&T Corp., was a wireless telephone carrier founded in 1987 in the United States, based in Redmond, Washington, and later traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the stock symbol "AWE", as a separate entity from its former parent.
Local number portability (LNP) for fixed lines, and full mobile number portability (FMNP) for mobile phone lines, refers to the ability of a "customer of record" of an existing fixed-line or mobile telephone number assigned by a local exchange carrier (LEC) to reassign the number to another carrier, move it to another location, or change the type of service. In most cases, there are limitations to transferability with regards to geography, service area coverage, and technology. Location Portability and Service Portability are not consistently defined or deployed in the telecommunication industry.
Area code 700 of the North American Numbering Plan is a service access code (SAC) implemented by interexchange carriers. It is reserved for carrier-specific number assignments to special services or destinations. It was introduced in 1983 for providing customized services in anticipation of the introduction of long-distance competition in the United States, but this usage has been deprecated. The area code has found renewed usage for custom calling services by voice over IP service providers and in software-defined voice networks.
A feature group, in North American telephone industry jargon, is most commonly used to designate various standard means of access by callers to competitive long-distance services. They defined switching arrangements from local exchange carriers central offices to interexchange carriers. These arrangements were described in an official tariff of the National Exchange Carrier Association, filed with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
Tellme Networks, Inc. was an American company founded in 1999 by Mike McCue and Angus Davis, which specialized in telephone-based applications. Its headquarters were in Mountain View, California.
Phone sex is a conversation between two or more people by means of the telephone which is sexually explicit and is intended to provoke sexual arousal in one or more participants. As a practice between individuals temporarily separated, it is as old as dial telephones, on which no operator could eavesdrop. In the later 20th century businesses emerged offering, for a fee, sexual conversations with a phone sex worker.
AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's third-largest telecommunications company by revenue and the largest provider of mobile telephone services in the U.S. As of 2023, AT&T was ranked 13th on the Fortune 500 rankings of the largest United States corporations, with revenues of $120.7 billion.
North-Eastern Pennsylvania Telephone Company (NEP) is a telecommunications provider headquartered in Forest City, Pennsylvania. The company operates as a local exchange carrier in rural areas of Lackawanna County, Wayne County and Susquehanna County. Besides landline telephone, NEP offers Broadband Internet, NEP Datavision IPTV and Wireless Phone Services.
Traffic pumping, also known as access stimulation, is a controversial practice by which some local exchange telephone carriers in rural areas of the United States inflate the volume of incoming calls to their networks, and profit from the greatly increased intercarrier compensation fees to which they are entitled by the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
Toll-free telephone numbers in the North American Numbering Plan have the area code prefix 800, 833, 844, 855, 866, 877, and 888. Additionally, area codes 822, 880 through 887, and 889 are reserved for toll-free use in the future. 811 is excluded because it is a special dialing code in the group NXX for various other purposes.
The history of AT&T dates back to the invention of the telephone. The Bell Telephone Company was established in 1877 by Alexander Graham Bell, who obtained the first US patent for the telephone, and his father-in-law, Gardiner Greene Hubbard. Bell and Hubbard also established American Telephone and Telegraph Company in 1885, which acquired the Bell Telephone Company and became the primary telephone company in the United States. This company maintained an effective monopoly on local telephone service in the United States until anti-trust regulators agreed to allow AT&T to retain Western Electric and enter general trades computer manufacture and sales in return for its offer to split the Bell System by divesting itself of ownership of the Bell Operating Companies in 1982.
Somos, Inc., is a company that manages registry databases for the telecommunications industry. Additionally, since January 1, 2019, the company has been the North American Numbering Plan Administrator, under a contract granted by the Federal Communications Commission.