What is VOIP?

VOIP stands for voice over internet protocol and it basically means that you can make phone calls using the power of the internet.  VOIP has become very popular in the past couple of years and there are now many new services that offer Voice Over IP Service.  The reason why VOIP is so popular is because it is far cheaper than making phone calls using a traditional land line phone service.

When it first appeared, the quality of the phone calls was very poor primarily due to the connection speed of most people's internet service.  VOIP primarily works with a broadband internet connection.  Anything slower than a DSL speed modem and your call quality will be poor and chunky.

Broadband internet connections have a big enough pipeline to allow your phone conversation to run through it with no loss of sound quality or reliability.  VOIP is far cheaper than land line calling and most VOIP services usually save people anywhere from 30% to more than 80% off their phone bill.  Many services offer unlimited calling to residential customers for a low monthly fee.  The beauty of Voice Over IP is that you can use your normal home phones hooked into simple phone adapters that are connected to your broadband internet connection.

There are many services that provide VOIP; the most common are Packet8, Vonage, Cablevision and Verizon.  Other services such as AOL and Google are also looking to get into the arena.  So if you are looking to save on phone calls, look into VOIP.

VOIP is now a popular alternative to land line phone calls. Voice Over IP is a way to make phone calls over the internet. Although VOIP has been around for many years, the technology that most people had at home wasn't viable to make high quality, reliable phone calls. As millions of people have switched to broadband, many of these homes and businesses can now enjoy quality calls on a normal home phone over the internet. The major reason for VOIP's success is its low cost, almost 80% lower for some people that call long distance on their normal land line phone.

Voice Over IP uses packet switching which allows several telephone calls to occupy the amount of space occupied by only one in a circuit-switched network.

Using the circuit-switched network a 10-minute phone call would consume 10 full minutes of transmission time at a cost of 128 Kbps. With Voice over IP a 10-minute call may have occupied only 3.5 minutes of transmission time at a cost of 64 Kbps. That leaves another 64 Kbps free for that 3.5 minutes time period plus an additional 128 Kbps for the remaining 6.5 minutes.

Another three or four calls could easily fit into the space used by a single call under the conventional system. This example doesn't even factor in the use of data compression which further reduces the size of each call.

VOIP is actually very simple technology. Your analog voice is digitized into data packets which are sent over the internet to the landline phone that you are calling. The phone that you are calling does not have to be connected to the internet because most of your phone call is routed over the internet, and turns back to analog once it switches back to the normal phone network.

Setting up VOIP is very easy; you normally need an adapter, a broadband internet connection, home phone and software. You can usually set up your VOIP phone in less than an hour. You just have to plug your land line phone into your adapter and the adapter into your broadband internet connection. This is mostly done with an internet router. With VOIP being easy to set up, very inexpensive to operate and flexible to use almost anywhere, you will surely see VOIP rise as a standard in the near future.