Welcome to Telephone Systems Now
 Most modern telephone systems are using a technology called VoIP.
There are a number of reasons for this. Before we start to explore them let's understand what VoIP is.
Voice over Internet Protocol, also called VoIP (pronounced "vee-oh-eye-pee"), IP Telephony, Internet telephony, and Broadband Phone is the routing of voice conversations over the Internet or through any other IP-based network.
Protocols used to carry voice signals over the IP network are commonly referred to as Voice over IP or VoIP protocols.
Voice over IP traffic can be deployed on any IP network, including ones lacking a connection to the rest of the Internet, for instance on a local area network.
VoIP has a number of advantages as a base telephony system, including low cost, high functionality that is difficult to achieve with traditional phone systems, and mobility meaning people can use VoIP telephone systems from any geographic position.
However VoIP has taken time to develop and has some implementation challenges that have caused some commentators to state that it is not yet ready for use in 'mission critical' applications.
We believe that this has now changed and VoIP is the phone communication technology foundation for the next decade.
Some of the challenges that have been, or are being overcome include jitter caused by the packets not arriving in sequence, and issues with firewalls and address translators.
Jitter has been largely overcome thanks to the use of jitter buffers, and you only need to ask a large corporation's IT architecture or IT security manager to know that in spite of all that they try to do, staff members can install VoIP phone applications like Skype on their PCs within the corporate intranet, and they work fine.
VoIP phone systems certainly perform better with broadband access to the internet, but even dial up connections can now use it effectively.
Internet connections are now much more reliable than earlier, as the internet service providers install infrastructure that can handle power outages and the like. Using VoIP telephone systems still requires the user to have backup power for any local devices they are using to get maximum reliability.
There are also a number of implications of VoIP phone systems which we will explore on these pages over time. They include issues with integration into the traditional wireline (POTS) phone system, the fact that no-one knows where a caller is calling from, the implications of VoIP for emergency services locating people in trouble, VoIP demand for mobile phone users, Voip security issues, VoIP caller ID issues, and many more.
However, in spite of all this, we believe that VoIP telephony systems are here to stay, and we will keep you up to date with the issues and solutions to the VoIP phone sytems explosive growth.
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