Voice Over IP

Voice over IP (VoIP, or voice over Internet Protocol) commonly refers to the communication protocols, technologies, methodologies, and transmission techniques involved in the delivery of voice communications and multimedia sessions over Internet Protocol (IP) networks, such as the Internet. Other terms commonly associated with VoIP are IP telephony, Internet telephony, voice over broadband (VoBB), broadband telephony, IP communications, and broadband phone.

Internet telephony refers to communications services —voice, fax, SMS, and/or voice-messaging applications— that are transported via the Internet, rather than the public switched telephone network (PSTN). The steps involved in originating a VoIP telephone call are signaling and media channel setup, digitization of the analog voice signal, encoding, packetization, and transmission as Internet Protocol (IP) packets over a packet-switched network. On the receiving side, similar steps (usually in the reverse order) such as reception of the IP packets, decoding of the packets and digital-to-analog conversion reproduce the original voice stream. Even though IP telephony and VoIP are used interchangeably, IP telephony refers to all use of IP protocols for voice communication by digital telephony systems, while VoIP is one technology used by IP telephony to transport phone calls.

Early providers of voice over IP services offered business models (and technical solutions) that mirrored the architecture of the legacy telephone network. Second generation providers, such as Skype have built closed networks for private user bases, offering the benefit of free calls and convenience, while denying their users the ability to call out to other networks. This has severely limited the ability of users to mix-and-match third-party hardware and software. Third generation providers, such as Google Talk have adopted the concept of Federated VoIP – which is a complete departure from the architecture of the legacy networks. These solutions typically allow arbitrary and dynamic interconnection between any two domains on the Internet whenever a user wishes to place a call.

VoIP systems employ session control protocols to control the set-up and tear-down of calls as well as audio codecs which encode speech allowing transmission over an IP network as digital audio via an audio stream. The choice of codec varies between different implementations of VoIP depending on application requirements and network bandwidth; some implementations rely on narrowband and compressed speech, while others support high fidelity stereo codecs. Some popular codecs include u-law and a-law versions of G.711, G.722 which is a high-fidelity codec marketed as HD Voice by Polycom, a popular open source voice codec known as iLBC, a codec that only uses 8 kbit/s each way called G.729, and many others.

VoIP is available on many smartphones and Internet devices so that users of portable devices that are not phones, may place calls or send SMS text messages over 3G or Wi-Fi.