Voice over IP, also known as VoIP, IP telephony, broadband phone service, broadband telephony or internet telephony in the beginning was looking much like the legacy telephone network.
What is the legacy telephone network?
The legacy telephone network is the phone system in our homes, the one that we used to use every day. It's over 100 years old although it has advanced over time. I was in an antique store recently and my daughter saw one of those old telephones with the rotary dial in the center and she asked me what it was. It's a telephone. An old legacy telephone. It wasn't that long ago that all of us used those rotary phones. Before the internet, this was our only option for phone use.
Then came the internet and Skype
The internet came to all of us and then came along companies like Skype which offered free calls in a closed network for a private user, with the option of changing for additional services. Google Talk also uses VoIP to communicate between users placing a call.
These VoIP services can be voice calls, fax, voice-messaging and SMS which is short message service or a text messaging service all done over the internet rather than the old fashioned phone system.
VoIP can be used on most internet accessed devices, including personal computers, PCs, laptop and desktops and smartphone, whether 3G, 4G or Wi-Fi.
How does it work?
VoIP uses encoding, signaling, channel setup and digitization of the analog voice signals. Digitized info is managed by resources and made into packets and transmitted over a network made for packet-switching.
Session control, controlled signaling protocols and set up and tear down are all employed. Special media protocols encode codes and streams are transported over IP networks. Audio, audio codecs with video and codecs with video are all used. Compressed speech and narrowhead implementations may be relied on as well as high fidelity stereo codecs. μ-law and a-law versions of G.711, G.722 are popular codecs which are open source and also known as iLBC which only uses 8 kbit/s each way called G.729.
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Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_over_IP
Jennifer
