Patent ID: 6961346

Claim:
A method for enabling communication between a plurality of telephony devices, comprising: receiving incoming media packets from each telephony device; dividing an incoming payload section of each incoming media packet into one or more data segments; inserting one or more silence placeholders to fill a time interval during which no incoming media packets are received from a particular telephony device; dividing a silence placeholder into one or more silence segments; aligning a silence segment from a telephony device with a data segment or a silence segment of one or more of the other telephony devices; mixing the data segments from two or more of the telephony devices to create an aggregate data segment, wherein mixing the data segments from two or more of the telephony devices to create an aggregate data segment further comprises: ignoring silence segments and mixing the aligned data segments from the two or more telephony devices to form an aggregate data segment; and if only silence segments are aligned, replacing the aligned silence segments with an aggregate silence segment; and constructing an outgoing payload section for one or more of the telephony devices by linking successively generated aggregate data segments.