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What Makes VoIP Special?

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What Makes VoIP Special?

By: Andrew Wiggin

Many persons are unable to understand how VoIP is able to provide a far better service than the telcos. If it's really that good, they ask themselves, why haven't the telephone companies themselves switched to VoIP? After all, they have the resources to do so. How can a small business, without making immense investments in infrastructure, provide the same or even better service that these behemoths provide?

The answer lies in the fact that the old telephone systems were devised at a time when the Internet wasn't available and even in the early days of the Internet, bandwidth was scarce making VoIP far less reliable than it is today. The core difference lies in the philosophy of the two systems - circuit switching and packet switching. VoIP uses the latter and this is why it's able to provide a better service. So what do these two terms mean?

Telephone systems were designed for complete reliability. When you place a call to another person, a dedicated line is established between you two. While the call is in progress, no one else can use that line. It's leased in a way which is why you pay by the minute since you're using a limited resource. While this provides unmatched reliability, it's also tremendously wasteful. The reason is that most of the time a telephone call is in progress, no data is being sent over the wire. That's the price for ultimate reliability. Sometimes, we even get a message telling us that all lines on a particular route are busy. "The lines are jammed" used to be the common phrase.

This system is called circuit switching.

Packet switching on the other hand, is what VoIP uses. Instead of establishing a single dedicated line between two users, VoIP splits the data into packets and sends each on its way separately mixed in with all the other traffic over the Internet. The packets have identification headers so the receiving system knows what to do with them and reassembles them at the other end. With a reasonable Internet connection by today's standards, this works just as well as a regular phone line. Better in fact since fast Internet speeds allow us to use better encoding and provide more advanced functionality than the telephone system ever could.

So instead of everyone using their own very thin lines to connect to each other, we all use one big pipe - figuratively speaking of course. In reality there are many different paths the VoIP traffic could take. And that about sums it up. Packet switching vs Circuit switching. The two driving technologies of VoIP and the PSTN system respectively.

Article Source: http://articles.tiptopweb.info

Andrew Wiggin is an expert consultant on Creating SIP Accounts. He also specializes in Setting up Mobile VoIP. onsip.com/sip/sip-account www.onsip.com/mobile-voipt

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