Free Conference Calling Blog

Some of you may have noticed that Rondee was not accessible for a period of time this past weekend. We apologize for this unplanned outage. It was due to a catastrophic failure at our primary hosting facility, theplanet.com. Here is an article about the outage, which affected 9,000 companies.

We have restored full service as of today. There was no loss of data, and most of those affected were able to use our backup conferencing system to hold successful Rondees.

Thank you for sticking with us through this outage. We are currently investigating ways to increase redundancy in our systems to ensure this does not happen again.

A few folks have written to us asking what could have happened.  Invariably the answer is this: After inputting the PIN, you must press pound.  Otherwise, Rondee will not know that you have finished inputting your PIN and will wait for you to continue.  In a few cases, users report that they entered their PIN and pressed pound only to be told that “This Rondee is not in use”.  Assuming you have dialed in at the correct time, this error message is generally caused if the PIN is entered too quickly or if the reception on your phone is poor and the tone transmission is affected.  The solution is to re-enter your PIN a bit more slowly.

If you start a bit late, no problem.  As long as someone joins the Rondee within 30 minutes of the scheduled start, the space will be ‘held open’ for the group. If the call goes later than anticipated, its still not a problem. You can keep talking as long as you like.

Only Rondee gives you a convenient way to schedule calls on the web, a universal access number 619-2-RONDEE (619-276-6333) you can put in your speed-dial, and your very own virtual meeting space where registered users don’t need to remember random codes.

And, besides being free, Rondee also includes convenient web-based scheduling.

A few folks have asked about whether or not you to register to use the Rondee free conference calling service.

In short, you do not need to register for Rondee unless you want to schedule your own Rondees using the Rondee website. However, there are benefits to registration for everyone:

If you are the organizer, you first need to navigate your way back to that Rondee’s page.  You have two options to navigate your way back.

1) You can either click on the link in the e-mail you received when you organized the Rondee; or
2) you can log back into your account, click on “My Rondees” and then select the particular Rondee you want to cancel

Once you are on that Rondee’s page, you will see a red button in the lower right hand corner called “Cancel Rondee”

Simply click on that button

Note: this works for regular Rondee as well as recurring Rondees

You do not need to register for Rondee unless you want to schedule your own Rondees using the Rondee website. However, there are benefits to registration:

Yes. As long as someone (e.g. the organizer or any invitee) joins the Rondee within 30 minutes of the scheduled start, the space will be ‘held open’ for the group. If the call goes later than anticipated, no problem. People can keep going as long as they like.

Inviting more people to a Rondee conference call is possible, provided the organizer has allowed this.  It is an option that the organizer selects as part of the Rondee setup process.  Remember: your PIN only works for you, so if you want to invite someone else, be sure to visit Rondee (just click on the link in the email you received) rather than forwarding that email.

Rondee now provides organizers with a special PIN that can be distributed to others who would like to listen-in on an ongoing conference call.

On your invitation page, you will now see a “Listen-only PIN”. This PIN is unique to your conference, and it remains private unless you distribute it to others.