About the VoIP

VoIP? What's that?
I heard it from a friend of mine and didn't now what it meant at all. So I decided to gather info on the net. The whole name is "Voice over Internet Protocol" and the definition is "a general term for a family of transmission technologies for delivery of voice communication over IP networks such as the Internet or other packet-switched networks". Synonymous with VoIP are IP telephony, Internet telephony, voice over broadband, broadband telephony, and broadband phone.

Internet telephony refers to communications services (voice, facsimile, and/or voice-messaging applications) that are transported via the Internet, rather than the public switched telephone network. It involves the conversion of the analog voice signal to digital format and compression/translation of the signal into Internet protocol (IP) packets for transmission over the Internet.

I wondered what the benefits of using VoIP could be and I found out that there are both cost and flexibility benefits. First of all, VoIP can be a benefit for reducing communication and infrastructure costs. For example, conference calling, call forwarding and automatic redial, usually charged extra in traditional telecommunication companies, are available free of charge from open source VoIP implementations. Costs are lower, mainly because of the way Internet access is billed compared to regular telephone calls. While regular telephone calls are billed by the minute or second, VoIP calls are billed per megabyte. In other words, VoIP calls are billed per amount of information (data) sent over the Internet and not according to the time connected to the telephone network.

Another benefit is flexibility. Examples include the ability to transmit more than one telephone call over a single broadband connection without the need to add extra lines. Secondly, most of the difficulties of creating a secure telephone connection over traditional phone lines, such as digitizing and digital transmission, are already in place with VoIP.

Furthermore, only a sufficiently fast and stable Internet connection is needed to get a connection from anywhere to a VoIP provider. Finally, it is possible to integrate VoIP with other services available over the Internet, including video conversation, message or data file exchange during the conversation, audio conferencing, managing address books, and passing information about whether other people.

Now that I've known VoIP, I can't do without!