What is Voice over IP? Voice over IP is another Internet Protocol which allows to make voice calls over your computer network rather than relying on the old technology of Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) to place a call. PSTN was incredibly popular back in the days but not as much. This is not say PSTN is replaced by voice over IP but PSTN is almost on its way out.
Popularity of VoIP
Why Voice over IP is preferred in this modern time than PSTN? There are lot of factors involved here. One of them is saving tons of cost for hardware devices and their maintenance. Because, think of this. A company has 100 employees and each of them need some way to communicate with each other right away on a call. You would need 100 phones for 100 employees. Now from each of them has two set of wires going out. One carry the voice and another data. That is just a pure mess.
This is where the voice over IP comes in to the rescue. VoIP works perfectly on any kind of high-speed internet connection. Be it cable or DSL. VoIP is often thought of as a single protocol but in practice, VoIP is a collection of protocols which makes the whole concept of making phone calls over network possible. One of the most popular VoIP protocol is Session Initiation protocol (SIP). There are some VoIP application protocol which belongs to the company itself and absolute proprietary.
Usage of VoIP
Many of the corporations out there utilise VoIP for their internal phone networks and there are bunch of vendors out there which provide the perfect solution for this case. Like Skype, Cisco, Arris, Comcast etc. One of the key thing you need to remember is, you need to consider the network latency way more than network speed. Network latency is the amount of time each of the packet takes from the source to the destination. This latency is measured in Milliseconds.
You need to make sure the network has low latency. The higher the latency the more cut off and trouble the VoIP will have. If your company has high latency network, you need to address that issue first before implementing a VoIP.
Note that VoIP is not limited to your system. VoIP is able to completely replace the old copper phone line as well. When it comes down to implementing a VoIP solution. You want to consider either a dedicated VoIP phones or a dedicated VoIP box which can interface with your existing analogue phones. There are vendors which provide VoIP phones and your VoIP solutions. Like – Nextiva, Ring Central, Dialpad, Ooma Office, grasshopper, 8 x 8, Magic Jack etc. These vendors are hot now in 2022 but not VoIP is not limited to these vendors. All of these vendors have their own characteristics and reason to pick.