A VoIP Definition

A VoIP definition is the technology that breaks up your voice during a telephone call into small pieces known as packets.

These packets can then be transmitted via the internet to the person who is listening at the far end, ie the person you are talking to, where these packets are re-assembled into a voice stream.

In recent years it has had a reputation for being a poor quality and often illegal service, used at the cheapest end of the market. This is a sentiment that was spread by many Service Providers who envisioned how it would eventually change the telephony business and threaten their traditional high sources of income.

Imagine a Telecoms Provider who was charging £1 per minute for a call to Australia, and then suddenly found a new entrant in the market offering a price of £0.04 per minute for a similar service! Once competition broke out in the international telecoms market, service providers found a large proportion of their traditional revenues disappearing at an alarming rate.

An immediate reaction was to 'down' the new technology and discredit the service of the alternative operators. The impact on the market was to spread concern among consumers, and hence delay the growth of VoIP technology.

It's true that early VoIP service often had elements of poor quality, which frustrated the consumer. If you were one of the people using a cheap VoIP service in the late 1990's to make an international call, (I know I certainly was), a couple of the problems you may have experienced were :

- Echo on the line, caused by a lack of echo cancellation devices

- Voice delay, ie hearing the other person's voice a couple of seconds after they had spoken, leading to a confusing conversation

- Broken up service, hearing only fragments of voice, caused by loss of packets in the network.

However, times have changed. VoIP service on the whole has dramatically improved over the past 2-3 years, and use of Voice Over IP has grown at a phenomenal rate. In fact, some analysts estimate that 35% of all calls now pass through a VoIP network, and the trend is set to continue.

Even the traditional service providers either have done, or plan to, spend huge amounts of money rolling out their own Voice Over IP networks, which can only continue to add to the credibility of the technology and the products & services it offers.

In the following sections, we'll be taking a look in detail at some of the key topics associated with this technology growth :

- What are the advantages and disadvantages of VoIP?

- How does a basic VoIP architecture look?

- When and why is VoIP cheap?

- How does the consumer get started, and what will it cost?

There are also a number of other useful links to information that you may find helpful.

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