How Does Voip Work?
CIRCUIT SWITCH TECHNOLOGY
With so many changes in the telecommunications industry, it can be difficult to keep up with the latest trends. However, there's one development you should become familiar with in a hurry—VoIP.
In order to understand VoIP, it's first necessary to understand the background. In the past, telecommunications companies were dependent on something called circuit-switched technology to relay phone calls. With this system, there's a permanent connection between the calling and the called parties for as long as the call is in progress. The drawback to this is that you need a serious amount of bandwidth for every call, and it's only usable for telephone-to-telephone calls—not any other type of calls.
In addition, the hardware for this kind of network is costly because the voice and data have to be transported on different wires. That means you need separate hardware to take care of the two forms of traffic. In the end, consumers must bear the cost of the expense of building and maintaining a circuit-switched network. That means higher phone bills overall.
In contrast, VoIP involves calls over networks that use Internet Protocol, or IP. For instance, the call may actually traverse the Internet, or it may traverse a private data network that relies on IP to carry the calls from one place to another. Another characteristic of such calls is that the voice stream is divided into packets and compressed. The calls are then transported by a number of different routes in the interest of easing possible "traffic" congestion.
On the other end of the call, the packets are reconstituted, decompressed, and transformed back into a voice stream. The software and hardware involved vary according to whether the call started with a computer, a telephone, or what's known as an Integrated Access Device, or IAD. The components required are also dependent on whether the call ends at a computer, IAD, or telephone.
As you might imagine, there are a number of pluses to using VoIP. Voice and data can be sent over the same lines, reducing costs. And, since the calls are compressed, the lines can handle a higher volume of traffic than a traditional circuit-switched system can. The sound quality of VoIP tends to be quite good, meaning quality is not being compromised in the interests of lowering costs.