As technology grows, newer and newer appliances are available. It seems there's no stopping! The latest communications innovation is the voice over IP technology. Here's a brief introduction to voice over IP.

Internet Voice

Internet Voice, also known as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), is a technology that allows you to make telephone calls using a broadband Internet connection instead of a regular (or analog) phone line. Some services using voice over IP may only allow you to call other people using the same service, but others may allow you to call anyone who has a telephone number - including local, long distance, mobile, and international numbers. Also, while some services only work over your computer or a special voice over IP phone, other services allow you to use a traditional phone through an adaptor.

Place a voice over IP call

Depending on the service, one way to place a voice over IP call is to pick up your phone and dial the number, using an adaptor that connects to your existing high-speed Internet connection. The call goes through your local telephone company to a voice over IP provider. The phone call goes over the Internet to the called party's local telephone company for the completion of the call.

Voice over IP advantages

Voice over IP's advantages over traditional telephony include:

• lower costs per call, especially for long-distance calls
• lower infrastructure costs: once voice over IP infrastructure is installed, no or little additional telephony infrastructure is needed.
  
  Note that voice over IP traffic does not necessarily have to travel over the public Internet: it may also be deployed on private IP networks.
  
  

VoIP protocols

The VoIP protocols used to carry the signal over the IP network are commonly referred to as Voice over IP, or VoIP protocols. VoIP protocols include H.323, which also provides SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), a protocol to initiate Voice over IP connections.

Quality of Service

Because IP does not by default provide any mechanism to ensure that data packets are delivered in sequential order, or provide any Quality of Service guarantees, implementations of VoIP face problems dealing with latency and possible data integrity problems.