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f you're a smart businessperson, you're always looking for new ways to maximize efficiency and minimize costs.One of the ways you may be thinking about is trying out Internet telephony and VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol),which lets you use the Internet to make and receive phone calls.Internet telephony isn't a new technology (it's been around for years in one form or another), but only in recent yearshas it become reliable and ubiquitous enough to be a serious choice for business. While Internet telephony wasonce an oddity often plagued by garbled and dropped calls, these days a well-planned and implemented VoIP sys-tem can provide call quality and reliability that rivals mobile phone or landline calls.
The Benefits
VoIP offers benefits over conventional telephony, and they generally boil down to lower cost, less complexity, andmore advanced communication features. The technology's most noteworthy advantage (and the one that attracts the most attention initially) is the potentialfor savings on telecommunication charges. Conventional business phone service can be quite pricey when you con-sider the cost of multiple phone lines, additional charges for special features like three-way or conference calling,and the fact that most providers bill business calls by the minute (particularly for long distance). VoIP lets you conduct your voice calls across the same data network you use for everyday applications like Webaccess and e-mail, eliminating the cost of dedicated voice lines. Even better, VoIP providers typically don't chargeextra for those added calling features, and most offer unlimited local and long-distance calling for a relatively low flatfee. (International calls often entail nominal per-minute charges.) It's not hard to see how VoIP will usually result inlower and more predictable phone bills for business.In addition to the lower-cost phone calls, VoIP imparts additional savings by reducing the complexity of your technol-ogy infrastructure. For example, when you eliminate dedicated voice lines, you no longer need to administer sepa-rate voice and data networks. Since each network has its own equipment and vendors, you'll likely pay less forongoing capital investments and support services. Many VoIP service providers offer hosted PBX services that letyou take advantage of advanced VoIP features without buying or maintaining any in-house equipment.Beyond saving you money, VoIP also has the potential to make you more productive by giving your communicationsa mobility it's never had before. Mobile phones already let you keep in touch on the road, but what if, instead of aseparate phone number, you could take your office line with you when you travel? Take a VoIP phone on the road,and you can place or receive calls as if you were sitting at your desk from almost anywhere. Moreover, since yourphone number is mobile as well, you can make "local" calls back home or call around the globe without worryingabout cell phone roaming or hotel surcharges.
How It Works
To understand how VoIP works, it's helpful to compare it to conventional phone calls. When you place a "regular"phone call using the Public Switched Telephone Network or PSTN (also known as POTS, for Plain Old TelephoneService) it's known as a circuit-switched telephony, because it sets up a dedicated connection between two pointsfor the duration of the call. VoIP on the other hand is known as packet-switched telephony, because the voice information travels to its destina-tion in countless individual network packets across the Internet. This type of communication presents special TCP/IPchallenges because the Internet wasn't really designed for the kind of real-time communication a phone call repre-sents. Individual packets may - and almost always do - take different paths to the same place. It's not enough tosimply get VoIP packets to their destination - they must arrive in a fairly narrow time window and be assembled inthe correct order to be intelligible to the recipient.
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Bringing VoIP to the SMB
Bringing VoIP to the SMB, An Internet.com Networking eBook. © 2007, Jupitermedia Corp.
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