Sending voice online

VOIP, or Voice Over Internet Protocol, allows you to send voice communications over the Internet and avoid the toll charges that you would normally receive from your long distance carrier. When you send information across the Internet, an email for instance, it costs the same if you send it to your next-door neighbor or your friend across the country, but the cost of making a phone call next door or across the country is different. If you could send voice as if it were data, then it wouldn’t matter whom you were talking to. VOIP packages phone conversations the same way that data (an email or a download for example) is packaged and then sends it across the same line.

Although the concept of VOIP is easily understood, the implementation and use of it is more complicated. In order to send voice, the information has to be separated into packets just like data. Packets are chunks of information broken up into the most efficient size for routing. From there, the packets need to be sent and put back together in an efficient manner. This process is smooth in theory, but voice communications over the Internet are not as seamless as they are over a traditional phone lines. While the technologies are improving, there are still concerns about the quality of voice communications over the Internet.

VOIP isn’t the only way to send conversations over a network like the Internet. VOIP is one of a group of technologies called voice over packet networks. Other network protocols like asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) can perform similar functions. Originally VOIP and other voice over packet networks were expected to transform telecommunications. However, lack of high quality services and infrastructure costs have inhibited the success of these technologies. Some companies have started already to implement or test packet networks for voice communications. I think the cost savings of switching from traditional phone lines to VOIP or similar technologies is often exaggerated because the added stress that the communications will put on the existing data lines isn’t taken into account.

At first, only a few companies like Cisco and Lucent offered VOIP services, but large telecommunications carriers are catching on. VOIP is predominately used for personal instead of enterprise-wide use, but like everything else, as the technology changes so will the people who use it.

(Franco Mendoza is System Administrator for Verizon Pacifica.)