V o I P Voice Over Internet Protocol
VoIP is, in fact, using the TCP/IP suite of Internet working.
TCP/IP was designed to handle all kinds of data types.
So why not use it for telecommunication purposes.
As you already know, the network can be connection oriented, reminding us that to phone to a friend you need him to be there at the end of the line and pick up the receiver and then talk to you…
If not, the answering machine does the job, but that’s another problem.
We know the way the network is managing the data is close to our need to phone.
However, there is a network characteristic that prevents to do it properly.
The network is asynchronous.
It means that the protocols used can ask for repeating data that is corrupted, just because the connection is very slow or a lot of users are connected or the line is bad.
So the deal is to write an application able to synchronized the data in the same way as an electronic commutation does.
It is not that easy, but some software is now on the market and used by international providers allowing users to phone at low price over Internet.
Because the Internet is an open pipe for connecting any computer for any data transfer, you can find also some freeware.
The two big problems are keeping a good Qos (Quality of Service) for the communications and making the correspondence between a regular user (cell phone or wired phone) and the IP addresses used by computers…
This task seems so huge that, at that time few of big companies did not take this challenge.
However, it is quiet obvious that the international telephony is going to move to VoIP.
Although the Qos management is not easy, the low price of this kind of communication will attract a lot of interest to, I guess, start a real VoIP international network.