06 Dial-in
One bar of signal is enough.
Phone dial-in for video meetings, billed per minute of PSTN audio. A participant with no data plan, no app and no patience dials a number, types the meeting code and is in the room with everybody else. Call-me works the other way: the meeting rings them.
What it costs
Minutes, not seats.
Dial-in is billed per minute of PSTN audio. Nothing is charged when nobody is on the phone. One person on the line for a 40-minute call is 40 minutes; two people on the line for the same call is 80.
That basis is the only honest one for a telephony leg, because the cost of carrying it is per minute at our end too. What your proposal states is the rate band for the countries you dial from and the monthly minute volume you expect. Most teams overbuy capacity and underbuy dial-in: they size the licence for a 500-person town hall and forget the twelve field staff who join every Monday by phone.
- Price basis
- Per minute of PSTN audio
- Call-me
- Same per-minute basis. No separate fee.
- Phone legs per meeting
- 50 as standard; higher quoted per proposal
- Audio quality
- 8 kHz narrowband, as the phone network carries it
- Bandwidth to the caller
- None. The phone network carries the leg.
- Reporting
- Minutes per meeting, per number and per month in the admin console
Who actually uses it
Four people on a typical account.
Nobody buys dial-in minutes for the office. They buy them for the handful of people whose jobs happen somewhere a laptop does not go.
The site foreman
Truck cab, dusty windshield, one bar. He has 40 minutes of Monday planning to sit through and a phone that is six years old. He dials, he listens, he says his bit about the delivery, he hangs up.
The clinic nurse
Corded desk phone at a reception counter, no personal device allowed on the floor. She joins the fifteen-minute handover by phone because that is the only device in reach that is permitted.
The client who will not install anything
An external party, one meeting, zero appetite for an app or a browser permission prompt. A phone number in the invitation gets them on the call in twenty seconds.
Anyone whose wifi just died
The fallback nobody plans for. The meeting invite already carries the number and code, so the person who drops out of a presentation is back in the audio within a minute.
How it behaves in the room
A phone leg is a participant.
Someone on the phone appears in the participant list like anyone else, with a name once they identify themselves or a masked number until they do. The host can mute them, move them to a breakout room and admit them from the waiting room exactly as with a video participant. They hear the room; the room hears them.
What they cannot do is see. No screen share, no whiteboard, no gallery. If a drawing matters to the person on the phone, say the numbers out loud or post the frame into the channel afterwards. We have watched too many calls where the presenter said "as you can see here" to a man in a truck.
The phone audio is mixed into the recording and transcribed with the rest, though a PSTN leg at 8 kHz transcribes less accurately than a headset. Keypad controls are the dull ones that everybody already knows: mute, unmute, raise hand.
Instead of dialling in, the participant enters their number once and the meeting rings them. It saves typing an eleven-digit code with gloves on, and it is the only sensible option for someone driving. Numbers used for call-me are stored against the participant's own profile and nowhere else, and a workspace can switch the feature off entirely.
Sizing the minutes
Count the people, not the calls.
Minutes are easy to estimate and almost everyone gets them wrong in the same direction. Take the number of people who will genuinely join by phone in a typical week, multiply by the length of the meetings they join, multiply by the number of those meetings, then multiply by four and a bit for the month.
Twelve field staff on one 45-minute Monday call is 540 minutes a week, about 2,340 a month. Add the occasional client who dials a 30-minute review and you are near 2,600. That is a small number and it is nothing like the 50,000 some teams put in the configurator because they assumed everybody would use it.
A 720p tile needs about 1.2 Mbps each way. Ask for 1080p and that becomes 3. Plan for the person on hotel wifi. The person on a phone needs none of that, which is exactly why the quality tier and the dial-in volume should be decided together rather than in separate meetings.
Ask for 1080p video and heavy dial-in in the same deployment and you get a flag: your audience is on weak links, consider 720p. Paying for a high-definition tier while a third of the room is on a telephone is money spent on pixels nobody sees.
Which countries people dial from, whether any site needs a local number rather than a long-distance one, and whether call-me is allowed under your own policy. Those three answers move the rate band more than the volume does.
Put your real numbers into the configurator and it writes the minute estimate into the inquiry for you, along with the licence tier and the storage figure.
Before you ask
Questions about phone dial-in.
How is dial-in billed?
Per minute of PSTN audio, counted from answer to hang-up on each leg. One person on the phone for 40 minutes is 40 minutes. Two people on the same call is 80. The admin console reports minutes per meeting and per month.
Can the meeting call the participant instead?
Yes. Call-me rings a number the participant enters and connects them when they answer, billed on the same per-minute basis.
How many people can dial in to one meeting?
Up to 50 phone legs per meeting as standard. Higher limits for town halls are quoted in the proposal alongside the webinar attendee blocks.
Is the phone leg encrypted?
The leg between our bridge and the meeting is encrypted in transit like any other. The segment carried by the public telephone network is not ours to encrypt, and no provider can claim otherwise. If a conversation must never touch the phone network, do not enable dial-in for that meeting. The admin console can block it per meeting type.
Who does not need dial-in?
A company where everyone works at a desk on fixed broadband. If nobody is ever away from a data connection, dial-in minutes are a line on the bill that buys nothing. Leave the module out and add it later if the field team grows.
Ask for a proposal
Who joins by phone?
Tell us how many people dial in, how long the calls run and where they dial from. We send back a minute estimate and the rate band in writing, within one working day.