What is VoIP?
Voip, or Voice over Internet Protocol, is a technology that enables people to use the Internet as the transmission medium for telephone calls. Voice data is sent in packets through your high-speed Internet connection rather than by traditional POTS lines (Plain Old Telephone Service). Voip is significantly less expensive than typical telephone long distance packages, plus one high speed Internet connection can serve for multiple phone lines with no loss in functionality, reliability, or voice quality.
Who Can I Call?
Anyone and everyone! Any local phone, mobile phone, long distance, or international number -- if a number can be dialed, you can call it with Voip. Almost all plans include long distance for U.S. and Canada, so you can say goodbye to your long distance bill as well. Like to call internationally? No problem! Most plans include very low international rates, and some even offer unlimited calling to Europe.
How Do I Receive Phone Calls?
When you get a phone call, your phone will ring just like normal. Voip works exactly like you're used to -- all it's done is replace the high priced phone lines with voip's low cost, high speed internet service.
How Does VoIP Work?
If, for example, you made a 30-minute call the circuit would be continuously open, and thus used, between the two phones. Up until about 1960, this meant that every call had to have an actual dedicated wire connecting the two phones. Thus a long distance call cost so much, because you were paying for pieces of copper wire to be connected all the way from your phone to the destination phone, and for that connection to remain constant throughout the call.
Today, however, your analog call is converted after leaving your house to a digital signal, where your call can be combined with many others on a single fiber optic cable. While this system is certainly an improvement over the past copper wire system, it is still quite inefficient. This inefficiency is due in part to the fact that the telephone line can't distinguish between useful talking and unneeded silences. For example, in a typical conversation while one person is talking the other person is listening.
Thus the current analog system uses roughly half its space sending useless messages like this silence. But there is also more information, even down to pauses in speech, which under a more efficient system can be effectively cut out rather than wasting the circuit space. This idea of only transmitting the noisy bits of a telephone call and saving a great deal on circuit space, is the basis of Packet-Switching, the alternative method to circuit switching that the VoIP phone system uses.
Packet-Switching is the same method that you use when you view a website. For example, as you read this website, your computer is not maintaining a constant connection to the site, but rather making connections to send and receive information only on an as needed basis (such as when you click on a link). Just as this system allows the transfer of information over the Internet to work so quickly, so also does it work in the VoIP system. While circuit switching maintains a constant and open connection, packet switching opens connections just long enough to send bits of data called packets from one computer to another.
This allows the network to send your call (in packets) along the least congested and cheapest lines available, while also keeping your computer or IP phone, free to send and receive messages and calls with other computers. This way of sending information, not to mention data compression, makes the amount of information which must be transmitted for every call at least 3-4 times less for VoIP than the exact same call in a conventional telephone system. For this reason, VoIP is so much cheaper than conventional calling plans.
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