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Internet Telephony – What Is It?

  • The advantages of IP Telephony over traditional, GSM and landline local telephony?
  • What do I need to start using Internet telephony?
  • Is there a difference between the Internet telephony and IP telephony?\
  • What Internet telephony networks exist?
  • Which place tales VoIP wholesale in the scheme of IP telephony?

Let’s look into all these issues.

Internet telephony, as it is clear from the name, works through public Internet networks. Most often this is the IP-telephony, which uses IP packets for voice and call \ rebound signals transmission. To date, the general recognition for IP-telephony has received the SIP protocol. In fact, it is responsible for finding the right person and send him a call. The voice and video, in turn, are encoded by the voice codec and packed into RTP packets. TCP / IP protocol stack already decides how to do this and delivers it to the desired point.

In the world, you can boldly identify two commercial networks of Internet telephony – Skype and Viber.

Viber is still the same SIP protocol, for establishing connections, and certain codecs for voice compression. Viber servers centrally store all the information.

Skype, unlike many other IP-telephony systems, uses P2P architecture to transfer the data. The list of Skype users is distributed to computers of users of the Skype network. This allows the network to easily scale to very large sizes (currently more than 100 million users, 15-20 million online) without the expensive infrastructure of centralized servers. Before buying Skype by Microsoft, Skype’s network was one of the most secure.

And, of course, the most important thing is that IP-telephony (Internet telephony) is used by operators, telecom operators, and providers. There is no need to lay cables and buy expensive equipment; all calls pass through an already existing Internet network.

What devices are necessary for IP telephony?

IP-phone looks like a stationary office analog phone, the only difference is that there is own mini computer inside it, and it works through an Ethernet network, and all voice processing is performed by means of a digital processor.

Softphone allows you to make calls using a computer and a headset. Most of the softphones are completely free of charge and do not require the purchase of any licenses.

It can also be installed on the smartphone, as an application and perform the functions of the phone on the phone.

The rank of the IP-phone should include wireless WiFi and DECT phones.

FXS gateway connects the conventional analog phone to Internet telephony services.

So, what are the pros and cons of using this technology?

Let’s start with the advantages.

There are two of them:

  • Internet conversations load much fewer communication channels than traditional equipment for calls. This is achieved due to the compression using an appropriate codec and packaged in data packets.
  • Significant savings in telephone conversations. Since an international (long-distance) telephone operator does not involve an IP telephone call, the cost of this call is an order of magnitude lower than the cost of a traditional telephone connection. Besides the cost of this service is cheaper and cheaper with each year. You can check rates on VoIP wholesale termination at the websites of popular VoIP providers.

The main disadvantage of Internet telephony for a long time was potentially a lower quality of communication. Moreover, the main disadvantage is the main advantage – packet routing of voice traffic. With a high network load, both the loss of part of the packets and the unacceptably long delays in their delivery are possible, hence the loss of words, echoes, and interference. However, the development of equipment and technology, as well as the Internet itself, has reached a level where the subscribers can clearly hear each other. So,  the interlocutors do not realize that the IP-telephony technology is responsible for the connection.