Teleconferencing system

A system and method for encoding the speech of multiple speakers for transmission on a limited medium such as ISDN or ADSL. The system and method encode one or more "dominant" speakers on a first channel, and merges all other speakers into a second channel. A "dominant" speaker may be defined according to the needs of the application, but intuitively it is a speaker in a collaboration session who has the "floor". The method and system transmit speech through a teleconferencing system having an available bandwidth. Speech from a speaking one, or ones, of the plurality of participants is passed while speech from non-speaking participants is rejected. The system responds to the speech from the one, or ones of the speaking participants passed by the speech detector, and determines which of the detected speaking one, or ones, thereof is a dominant speaker. The system allocates one portion of the available bandwidth to the determined dominant speaker and merges the non-dominant participant(s) onto a second bandwidth portion of the available bandwidth.