The invention manifests a secure, on-demand meet-me conferencing service embodied within a telephone network having an advanced intelligent network (AIN) infrastructure. Centralized control from a service control point of provisioned conferencing bridges located in network switches is effected in the AIN telephone network, thereby overcoming the resource efficiency limitations and corresponding costs of the prior art systems. In addition, it enables the local exchange carrier (LEC) to offer of a new type of conferencing service at a lower cost where prior reservation of conferencing facilities is no longer necessary and which possesses other advantages with respect to ease of use, ease of administration, availability and security. Users of the service first subscribe to it, and then utilize paired primary and secondary authorization codes to access a conference.