What is IP telephony?

IP telephony is used interchangeably with VoIP. It is the process of transferring voice, or video into packets of data and transferring those packets over the Internet.

IP phones are specialized phones that look entirely like a normal phone. However instead of using the regular RJ-11 phone connector, it uses a RJ-45 Ethernet connector. These phones connect right into your router. WiFi phones allow subscribers to be able to make VoIP calls from and WiFi zone.

The use of IP telephony is that like VoIP. The process uses the Internet to transfer voice into data and data to other phones, all across the worldwide networks,

This technology allows data to be processed using an IP network. By taking the voice data and flowing it over the general-purpose packet switched network, which instead of the traditional telephone circuit switched voice transmittal systems.

Traditional telephony works with circuit switching. This is the basic process.

1. You pick up your phone
2. Listen for a dial tone
3. Dial the number
4. A connection is made from your phone to the phone you are calling
5. This is using several connection switches along the way
6. The connection opens the circuit
7. You talk
8. When you hang up the circuit is closed

Now with current technology for traditional telephone service, your voice is more digitized and is sent over a fiber optic line.

A data network does not use any type of circuit switching. This process would then make your Internet slowing and that would defeat the purpose of the benefit of IP telephony or VoIP.

Instead, the information is sent in packets over a dedicated line. These data packets will flow over what is called a packet switching. Packet switching is the process of sending the data through a chaotic network of many possible paths, from one computer system to another.

IP Telephony works with these steps.

• Your computer sends the data transferred from voice or video to another computer.
• Inside each of these packet types is a certain amount of information. This is a form of condensed information that needed to be sent. This process is very fast.
• The sending computer, your computer sends the information to a nearby router.
• That router then sends the packets of information to another router. Each of these steps has security and encryptions involved in order to provide privacy to each phone call.
• When the receive computer gets the information through the packets, it decompresses the information and makes is sound just like it was sounding originally.

This process of packet switching is the most cost effective, way of using the least amount of congested lines to get the information from the sender to the receiver.

There are many benefits to the use of IP telephony. The providers are often able to offer a less expensive price to the services they have, phone lines, caller ID, voice mail, call forwarding, 3-way calling etc.

There is also a significant savings on international calls. This is because there is not connection charge or additional taxes.

The only areas of disadvantage to using the IP telephony or VoIP are that there are times when you would need to reset the router. This simple process takes only a few seconds. This rarely happens, maybe once or twice in a six-month period.

All and all, IP telephony currently is as reliable and carries the high quality of the traditional phone lines at a much less cost.

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