According to British Telecom, telephone meetings will be much easier using its Rendezvous Products Division’s new any phone, any time, any where conferencing products. The Executive telephone terminal, developed by Telspec Ltd of Rochester, Kent is a modernised version of the Conference 2000 point-to-point product. The terminal enables a group of people gathered around it to be heard and spoken to by someone using a conventional telephone, or by another group using a similar terminal. According to Rendezvous it has the advantage over the existing system of allowing two way speech on one line. Participants can interrupt one another without losing parts of sentences – voice clipping – or being cut-out as happens with loud speaking phones. Executive is based on the Intel 80C51 microcontroller and has a 256K of EPROM memory. In addition the Elite Conferencing Bridge has been brought in as a desktop alternative to Confertel 1, the product that enables meetings to go on between people in different locations. Elite’s five lines are controlled by a chairman who has the ability to cut people off or put them on hold as he wishes. The system’s dual channel capability means more than one meeting can take place at the same time. Elite also lets callers ring a central point and be interconnected automatically. Telspec is currently developing a 10 to 20 line version but a launch date has not been set as yet. In each case the systems will adjust to the acoustics of the room they are in. The Elite conferencing system and the Executive system are tagged at UKP2,950. Telspec Ltd notched up sales of UKP7.5m last year. It is the UK subsidiary of UKP13m a year Telspec Inc based in Atlanta, Georgia whose clients include all the Bell operating companies. Rendezvous is in Leatherhead.
