Business VOIP

If you hate paying for calling long distance, get ready to change your habit. VoIP, short for Voice over Internet Protocol, is your ticket to saving that hard-earned cash. If you’ve had a conversation using your computer with someone, chances are you’ve already used it.

Calling someone the traditional way involves lifting the receiver and dialling the number. Behind the scenes your telephony provider would establish a physical circuit to the phone of the person you’re calling. Your phone converts your voice into an analog electrical signal. The phone on the other end then converts the signal back to an audible voice.

Establishing a physical circuit is like building a virtual highway from your phone to the other phone: on-demand, depending on the number you dialled. But the scheme has a problem: no single telephony provider owns all the land for the highway. The provider has to take the help of other telephone companies who might already have some pieces of the highway in place. If your voice happens to travel on real-estate your telephony provider doesn’t own, rent must be paid. And, your provider will add it to your bill after inflating the figures.

Things on the Internet work differently. Say if you’d be transferring a file to your friend, the file will be broken down to small packets and sent to your Internet Service Provider (ISP). The ISP is connected to other ISPs which in turn are connected to many others in a mesh like fashion. After reaching the ISP, these small packets take their own routes to reach your friend’s ISP and then ultimately to his computer. There the packets are reassembled to the original file. You can call this way of transporting data: IP, or Internet Protocol.

What if we replace that file by your voice converted to digital data? Apparently the scheme isn’t that simple. As packets travel rather independently of each other, they take their own sweet time on different networks and may not arrive in the right order. Imagine saying “I love VoIP”, on the phone and the person hearing a garbled, “PIoV I loev!”

Soon, better ways of encoding voice to data became available and computers and Internet networks became smarter. And with the proliferation of broadband, sending Voice over IP finally became possible.