VOIP.com - Internet Phone Service

The technology behind telephone systems in use today has been around for over a century. Over the years, little has changed. In recent years, the Internet age has brought a new way to communicate-voip. Many early converts are predicting that voip will battle Ma Bell for dominance for years to come.

Standard Telephony

Standard phone systems are driven by circuit switching. When a person calls someone, the connection is established and maintained for the duration of the call. This is a circuit.

How it Works

You pick up the receiver, hear a dial tone, and connect to your local telephone carrier. When you dial, the network routes the call and connects to some other switches along the way. The phone rings, and someone answers it. The circuit is now open for the duration of the call. Hanging up closes the circuit, freeing your line and all the lines in between.

Circuit Switching

Until the '60s, calls required a dedicated wire from one end of the call to the other. A cross-country call required that pieces of copper wire be connected for the duration of the call-making for an expensive call. Today's telephony is more efficient and cheaper. The network digitizes your voice and sends it through fiber-optic cable for most of the journey. This saves on the amount of switching.

Voip Telephony

A standard phone only uses half the available connection. Voip telephony removes the silent intervals from the call-reducing the amount of data transmitted. Thus, voip only sends packets of data when a person talks. This is the basis of a packet-switched phone network.

Packet Switching

If you maintained a constant connection to this web page, your Internet connection would be much slower. Instead, your ISP sends and retrieves small chunks of data when required. This is packet switching-data packets sent along the least congested and cheapest lines.

How voip Works

Voip uses the Internet's packet-switching capabilities to provide telephone service-a tremendous data saver. A 10-minute phone call requires a fifth of the data of a circuit switched call. Thus, the network can carry four more calls at once.

Let's look at a voip phone call. You pick up the phone, sending a signal to your Analog Telephone Adapter (ATA). You dial the phone number as usual, and your ATA sends the data to the VoIP company's call processor. It maps the phone number to an IP address and connects the two ATAs. The recipient's phone rings. Upon answering, the network transmits data packets back and forth. The ATAs convert the packets into an analog audio signal. Except for what happens behind the scenes, the call is the same as a circuit-switched call.

So the Battle Rages

It could be another decade before the full switch to voip. Standard Telephony works, and has for a long time. However, there are many benefits of voip that will have scores of individuals and businesses migrating to it in the near future.