0 Voice over IP (VoIP)

Hello everyone, we're together once again! After the post about the sound card I recently picked up, I thought I would talk about something which is related to sound. Hence, today's topic is Voice over IP, or VoIP in short.

You might not be familiar with the term, but I'm sure once I tell you Skype is a VoIP service, you'll know what I mean. Every software which grants you the ability to transmit audio over internet is considered as a VoIP service. Now the name makes more sense, doesn't it?

Note that transmitting audio over internet is not limited to computers. There are phones called IP phones, which use an ethernet cable instead of a phone cable. They work like a regular phone does considering that you connected it to your router and have an active internet connection.

There are also phone adapters, called ATA (analog telephone adapter) which turns your standard phone into an IP phone. This is done by converting the analog telephone signal into digital signal in order to use it with internet. Setting it up is pretty simple as well. All you have to do is to plug your phone into the ATA, and the ATA to your router.

VoIP is getting really popular day by day since it has many advantages such as being able to change your Caller ID, call transfer, and three-way calling. It also includes the traditional phone features such as call forwarding, number filtering and many more.

How VoIP works is pretty simple. It's a basic packet transfer between two IPs. It's like downloading and uploading at the same time. You send and receive packets at the same time, which allows you to both send and receive audio.

VoIP comes with disadvantages as well, but they aren't too many. Basically, the only problem VoIP has is dependability. Power cuts, viruses, bandwidth problems may cause problems in your VoIP experience, which might get you in trouble in a case where you have to make a critical call. Then again, I don't think they are reasons not to use VoIP since they're pretty extreme cases in my opinion.

If you're more into the computer section of VoIP, and looking for software to use, I recommend Skype to start with. Provided you have a good connection, Skype is the best you can get. If you don't have sufficient bandwidth to use Skype, you can use other software such as TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, Mumble, or RaidCall. These software are usually used in gaming in order to lower bandwidth usage, gather large amounts of people in the same place easier than Skype, and maintain anonymity if preferred.

That being said, we come to the end of another post. I hope you enjoyed the read folks!