Voice over Internet Protocol
To understand how VoIP works, we need to look back into the murky depths of telecommunications history.
In the old days if you wanted to call someone on the telephone you spoke to an operator, who then connected your line to a switchboard and spoke to someone at another exchange who would then connect the line of the person you wanted to speak to. That created a connection between both phones along which the conversation could flow.
Those human operators were then replaced by machines, which essentially did the same thing but automatically, and then later by digital exchanges. Those, instead of creating a physical connection, reserved capacity on a network for clients’ conversations.
What VoIP does is instead of creating a connection between two handsets, it breaks conversations up into tiny pieces, called packets. For purposes of this illustration, imagine each word in a conversation being dropped into a packet.
The contents of those packets are squashed (compressed) as small as possible to make the system work optimally, and sent across the Internet or your private network.
Those packets are then uncompressed and reassembled at the receiving end – the trick being to get them there quickly so there’s no delay making the call, and in the right order, so that the person you’re calling doesn’t just hear gibberish.
Finweek
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