Posts Tagged ‘voice over Internet protocol’
VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol is a telephony system that takes advantage of broadband internet access to send and receive voice signals to facilitate a phone call. It converts analog signals into digital form before using the internet to send the packets to the other party. In order for the calls to be as identical as possible to regular phone calls, the internet connection must be fast enough to deliver the packets without any noticeable delay.
Although you might think that this might not provide any sort of advantage because you are just using the same line and hardware to do it. The advantages of VoIP are very prevalent that most large companies have already installed their own VoIP systems to complement their own phones and have already manage to cut down their telephone bills drastically. Even in homes where long distance calls are often made, they managed to successfully deploy
VoIP does this by cutting down on bandwidth usage. Voice calls occupy a fixed bandwidth whenever a call is connected regardless if there is sound being transmitted or not. VoIP compresses the analog input it receives and removes areas that have nothing but background noise. This process is so efficient that a single line could handle 5 to 10 times more calls in progress without much degradation in signal quality.
This improvement is so significant that even telephone companies have even deployed their own VoIP systems to handle their long distance calls between stations. Thereby raising their capacities by so much more and allowing them to slightly reduce their pricing and gain a lot more in profits at the same time. You might not know it but you might have been using VoIP technology without knowing it.
Despite all the advantages, VoIP does still have its drawbacks since the technology is very new and it has not been standardized that well just yet. Common problems of VoIP are usually related to your own internet connection. There are still no standard or protocol that prioritizes VoIP traffic over other ones thus making VoIP compete with all other services that are sharing the bandwidth. The most common bandwidth consuming activities are downloading and watching online videos. Even weather conditions can affect your internet connection at the provider level. Then there’s good old congestion, when too many people are using the internet at the same time in your area.
If we just look at the advantages and disadvantages of VoIP systems, we can surely say that VoIP is set to continue beyond the foreseeable future. Whatever kinks may exist in the system, as long as the wide savings margin still exist, there would still be plenty of people willing to develop and enhance the system to give better service to anyone who wants to cut costs. If you would like to know how important VoIP is, you just need to consider that VoIP is probably the technology that supersedes our old and outdated telephone systems. That’s how important VoIP is.
