In case you have not heard of Internet Telephony, or Voice Over IP, you must have been hibernating or you've been watching too much Donald Trump or Martha Stewart on TV...
Internet Telephony is THE hottest trend in replacing (or augmenting) the Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) with digital voice over the Internet for less cost and more features.
As we all know the Internet is still a "free" resource for the most part. Recent developments in high-speed low cost digital technology have enabled many start-up companies to offer competitive voice services to consumers.
These Internet Telephone comanies "convert" traditional POTS telephone voice calls into "digital" phone calls, and delivered them to the destination via the Internet at a lesser cost to the consumer.
There are many Internet Telephony service providers competing for our business. Well known companies include Vonage, Net2Phone, Lingo, AT&T, Verizon, Skype, and many others.
The common denominator for all these service providers is that the consumer must have a Broadband Internet connection at his/her location. This can be DSL, Cable Modem, Satellite, T1, ISDN, or Wireless.
The service provider will give you (or sell you) a "converter" box that sits between the current telephone handsets and the Broadband connection point. The end user simply plugs the existing phones into this box and then connect this box to the high speed Internet phone jack.
The Internet Telephone service provider issues an unique identifier called Internet Protocol address; or IP address. Once a connection to the Internet has been established, all of the POTS telephone voice calls are handled by the new service provider bypassing the local telephone company.
Internet Telephony typically comes with all of the added features just like the cell phones; caller ID, voice mail, call transfer, call forwarding, and call conferencing; all these features for less than what the local phone company charges.
By the way, many local incumbent phone companies tried to kill Internet Telephony because they are losing tremendous amounts of revenue to these new-breed Internet Telephone providers.
Fortunately, the FCC has some intelligence not to listen to the local phone companies, and supports a free use of the Internet for all, at least for now.
I welcome your comments and suggestions.
Robert King
RobertTheKing@gmail.com