Meet-me conference arrangement

A telephone switching office having a plurality of meet-me conference bridging systems is disclosed. An access code is assigned to each conference, and at an agreed upon time, all conferees for a conference dial the same access code. The switching office allocates a bridging system in response to the first call to arrive at the office. In the event more than one call for the same conference arrives at the host office concurrently, the processing of all but one call is delayed until an idle bridging system is connected to that one call. The delayed calls, and any future calls to the conference are then steered to the same bridging system.