Telephone hybrid(taken from sources so please check) First source: 1.

Definition o A hybrid phone system combines the ability for users to receive and make calls over single phone lines with VoIP technologies. VoIP, or Voice over Inter net Protocol, is a telephone service that uses the Internet for call transport, or to facilitate the making and receiving of telephone calls via a computer netw ork. Features o Common features offered by hybrid phone systems include caller identific ation, call transferring, call forwarding and integrated voicemail. Hybrid phone systems can also route long distance and international calls via the Internet a s opposed to a standard telephone network. Some advanced VoIP systems offer voic e mail text message alerts and remote notification. o Considerations o Hybrid phone systems can be impacted by Internet congestion, which can a ffect the quality of voice conversations. The dedicated broadband Internet conne ction necessary for hybrid phone systems is typically more expensive than servic e charges for a standard telephone system. Second source: Telephone hybrids are an essential functional component of the Public Switched T elephone Network (PSTN). The term also describes the piece of equipment used in broadcast facilities to enable the airing of telephone callers. The need for hybrids comes from the nature of analog plain old telephone service home or small business telephone lines, where the two audio directions are comb ined on a single two-wire pair. Within the telephone network, switching and tran smission are almost always four-wire circuits with the two signals being separat ed. Hybrids perform the necessary conversion. In older analog networks, this was required so that repeater amplifiers could be inserted in long-distance links. In today s digital systems, each speech direction must be processed and transported independently. The fundamental principle is that of impedance matching. The send signal is appl ied to both the telephone line and a balancing network that is designed to have the sa me impedance as the line. The receive signal is derived by subtracting the two, thus canceling the send audio. An effective hybrid would have high trans-hybrid loss, which means that relative ly little of the send audio would appear on the receive port. Too much leakage c an cause echoes when there is a delay in the transmission path, as there is with satellite, mobile phone, and VoIP links. This is a result of a talker s voice trave rsing to the far-end hybrid and returning to his own receiver with insufficient attenuation Good cancellation depends upon the balancing network having a frequency-vs.-impe dance characteristic that accurately matches the line. Since telephone line impe dances vary depending upon many factors and the relationship is not always smoot h, analog hybrids are able to achieve only a few dB of guaranteed isolation Telephone hybrids are also used to interface production intercom systems to the PSTN.