As I said in reply to Alice, no fixed line phone = absolutely necessary. Regarding Skype, I am dubious that these problems can be reliably fixed in the short term. But I would be delighted to be proven wrong. Regarding cost, I think that it is completely reasonable that ICANN arrange to reimburse you for real out-of-pocket costs i participating in conference calls. Alan At 12/06/2007 02:55 PM, Hong Xue wrote:

On 6/12/07, Alan Greenberg <<mailto:alan.greenberg@mcgill.ca>alan.greenberg@mcgill.ca> wrote: The GNSO uses the same teleconference facility. I would guess that the GNSO e-mails include specific times because the GNSO staff put them there, not because of the service provider. The GNSO conferences work relatively well most of the time, and with FAR more people participating. I suspect that part of the issue is that we have more people from "unusual" locations which require call-outs (and seemingly no mechanism to know that they have dropped and need to be re-called).

I think that we should outlaw the use of Skype and equivalent, and strongly discourage mobile phones unless absolutely necessary.

I don't believe that Skype should be excluded, but it should be better commodated by the service operator to resolve the problem of echoing. As for mobile, I don't like using it at all for the cast is very high. However, what if a participant (such as me) is so poor that she has no fix-line phone?

Hong

At 12/06/2007 01:16 PM, Izumi AIZU wrote:

...

I really ask ICANN/Nick to reconsider the Conf Call operator and suggest the feasibility of using the one GNSO is using (Alan, am I correct that they are better in service and quality?) Also to prevent some mistake Vittorio had, I also like to suggest the specific time to each member of ALAC be displayed in the call notice, just like the GNSO call annoucement does.

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