Things have come an awful long way in telecommunications since Alexander Graham Bell was awarded the patent for the first telephone in 1876. In the modern age, traditional public switched telephone networks have been superseded by a powerful convergence between telephone systems and the internet. VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) stems from that convergence. It is method for transmitting the voice sound signals in telephone calls over the internet using compressed packets of data. In effect voice sounds are converted to digital signals at the sender end, transmitted as digital data packets and then reconverted into sounds at the receiver end. The digital data packets contain the IP addresses of both the sender and the receiver. The old circuit switched networks had no need for this information as everything went along the same pre-determined route. In contrast, VoIP data traffic traverses the internet along different routes depending on congestion and other factors. This both adds flexibility to telephone communication and significantly reduces call costs.



VoIP emerged as a way of communicating for ordinary users in 1995 when Vocal Tech Communications introduced their IP telephony service in America. The protocol?s popularity grew significantly in the four years to 1999, when it facilitated lower cost calling on national long distance networks. That year was also significant because Mark Spencer (now Chairman and CTO of Digium) invented Asterisk, an open source telephony engine that would allow each computer to potentially become a PBX (private branch exchange) in it?s own right, opening up the possibility for business voip users to create more complex routing services that connected to traditional telephone systems. Another significant development came in 2002 when Skype launched its peer to peer telephony application, creating a growing online network of now over 440 million users. In the current market place, Skype competes against other established VoIP protocols such as SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), a multi-user signaling protocol that allows a wide variety of media content. As business clients switch their telephone systems over to VoIP, the number of hosted PBX users and calls has gone up dramatically. In 2007 there were around 860,000 hosted PBX users, but the market is still growing. In fact, research group Frost and Sullivan have suggested that there could be 4 million hosted PBX users by 2013. Each of these hubs could in turn be routing thousands of calls. Nevertheless, without help from services like Telespeak in the UK, many small and medium enterprises are scratching their heads about how to cost-effectively migrate their telephony systems to VoIP without necessarily junking existing hardware.



Contemporary definitions of VoIP distinguish three main parts. Interior VoIP means each company?s own local ethernet connected phone systems. Of course the term ?interior? is slightly deceptive here as online users can be plugged in anywhere in the world with different extension numbers. Meanwhile Exterior VoIP is what routes calls to distant company locations or the traditional Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). In effect this eliminates the need for separate phone lines, so users may not know they are using VoIP. The third part features hybrid technologies, where the service provider hosts the switch for the interior company and individual extensions come from the internet to the desktop. VoIP can therefore be used as a powerful and flexible ip telephony architecture reducing costs greatly for end users.





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