While there is no limit to how long your public conference line remains open, our phone infrastructure provider, Twilio, limits single phone call connections to 4 hours. This means that, for meetings running more than four hours, you'll need to connect a new conference line (aka: phone bridge) during your meeting.
To help with making that handoff smoother, there is now a Meeting Coach message that prompts you to connect a new line when a public conference bridge has been connected for more than 3 hours:
📢 IMPORTANT NOTE: |
Clicking the "Connect New Bridge" button initiates a new phone bridge connection and sets the phone bridge's initial state to muted in the public conference to avoid feedback. |
You can also opt to connect a new phone bridge by clicking the ellipses (3 dots) menu at the top of the Public Conference Line panel on the live meeting page, and selecting "Connect New Bridge" from the dropdown menu:
Connecting a new phone birdge works the same way with all meeting platforms.
If you have the waiting room/lobby feature turned on, be sure to re-admit the conference line as a participant:
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In Zoom, you'll click the Admit button next to the phone bridge number: | For Webex, the conference line will be assigned the name "Call-in User_#." Click the Admit icon to let it in: |
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We highly recommend turning the waiting room setting off in favor of a password-protected meeting, since your meeting should only have trusted meeting attendees joining. The public should never be given the Zoom/Webex/etc. meeting link. Instead, you'll share the PublicInput meeting link with the public. |
The conference line will likely be muted in the participants window (as indicated by the red microphone with a slash through it.)
If the line is muted, head to the PublicInput meeting page and press *6 next to the conference phone line to unmute the phone bridge:
Once the new bridge is connected & unmuted, double-check to ensure the phone bridge is un-muted in your internal conference service (Zoom, Webex, Google Meet or MS Teams).
this is what the conference line (phone bridge) looks like when unmuted in the Zoom participants window: | You'll see a green microphone next to the Phone bridge ("Call-in User_#") in the Webex participants window: |
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this process is similar for Google Meet and MS Teams
The meeting mangagement panels, including the Public Conference Line phone management panel (above) only appear 30 minutes prior to a meeting's official start time (set in PublicInput) and are displayed throughout the duration of the meeting for easy meeting management. These panels are displayed for Admin view only - the public does not see the speaker queue or recorded/transcribed comments. |
Once the conference line is connected and unmuted, all participants who have called in will be able to continue listening the Webex/Zoom/Google Meet/MS Teams meeting audio, your meeting's transcription will continue, and Closed Captioning will resume automatically on the live meeting video stream (if streaming.)
Note: You will also need to unmute the phone bridge in the event that you click the "mute all" button in the participants window, as well. |
You're phone bridge connection will be good to go for another 4 hours!
Related articles:
Managing phone participants
How to set up a "telephone town hall" meeting