Voice over IP – VoIP, as it’s properly abbreviated, though you’ll see
VOIP a lot – is the future of phones.
Basically, VoIP means using the Internet – based on Internet Protocol, or IP – to carry phone calls.
Traditional phone networks use special circuits to protect voice traffic and maintain voice quality and reliability. They have, of course, evolved over the years – there are no more switchboard operators plugging wires into and out of sockets to connect calls, as there used to be! (As often seen in movies, most recently in Changeling with Angelina Jolie as an operator and supervisor; her free long-distance phone access plays a minor role in the plot.)
Internet Protocol is a simple set of rules for sending data over possibly unreliable connections – such as the phone network, which is unreliable for non-voice data as it wasn’t designed for it! In IP, data is divided up into chunks – “packetized” – sent over the line (or carrier pigeons or whatever), then re-assembled at the other end.
You can see that this takes time and would tend to introduce lags to digitize, send and re-assemble the packets. But, with use increasing and investments in infrastructure growing, the Internet is getting so much better and more reliable that it can reasonably be used to carry voice calls – thus, VoIP.
However – and we are still researching this – Google Voice is apparently a call redirection service rather than “true” VoIP. It uses phone lines to send analog voice signals, rather than IP packets, from one point to the next.
This is a bit disappointing to VoIP zealots but welcome to the rest of us, who should get better call quality as a result.
However, we’re still awaiting a detailed explanation of just how Google Voice works – and waiting for it to be available beyond the GrandCentral community and a few reviewers, as well!
