A Simple Overview of VOIP

To start off let’s talk about how you would place a telephone call now. To start you would need a phone that is plugged into your in-house telephone wiring. When you pick up the phone and make a call the phone makes a connection through the copper wire installed in your house and runs down the street to the phone company’s switch. The switch will then help guide the call on its way to the person with whom who wish to speak to.

VOIP on the other hand is changed to bits and bytes so it can travel over a data network. Phone systems like a Mitel , Cisco, and Linksys One will use VOIP as it’s main method throughout your business office. In some cases they will change it back to running over wire when it leaves the building in others it will still use VOIP as its main communication. This allows you to share one cable for both your computer and your phone; this results in savings on your cable installation.

In the past VOIP had many problems. This was mainly due to the fact that the Internet was not very fast and would not recognize VOIP as packets that needed priority. This caused a lot of jitter and dropped calls. The system today is very robust. Most of the time you cannot tell that the call is placed using VOIP. This combined with the great savings make this a trend worth looking at. For instance, 3 phone lines through a VOIP system would cost you $120 a month and will include over 10,000 minutes of local and long distance calling. If you look at your current telephone bill you will notice the savings that can be had.

One thing to note is that the system does not work very well with fax systems. When it does work the speed needs to stay under 9600 baud. New fax systems will call out at 33600 baud so they will not work correctly. I recommend using a standard analog line for your fax machine. If you use the Linksys One system this is also a good place to use one of there gateway devices. This way you can use the line for both a fax and a backup for the phone system in case the Internet goes down.