What is Voice Over IP, VOIP, Voice IP?

Here is an explanation that I found on internet that seems pretty accurate I hope it can clear the meaning VOIP, voice over ip, voice IP or how you want to call it.

What is voice over ip? Well fancy vibration really. Have you ever seen one of those sci-fi movies where a group of astronauts, gives shot up into space usually to fight some aliens of go to space station or something like that, every sci-fi space movie has this scene where one of the unfortunate astronauts hits the wrong button or goes trapped by an alien or something and gets shot out of the side of the space station into the empty atmosphere, if the movie is being accurate what you see is this unfortunate astronaut straggling going (haaa, haaa) he is yelling but there is not sound, he is completely silent.

Why? Because is not air in the space and really all sound is vibrations. That is what they figured out in the sixteenth century “sixteenth century” the tin tin string idea came out that you build when you were a kid where you speak into one end of a cup or can lets tie some string, it vibrates the bottom of the cop it vibrates the string in and that vibration travels all the way to the other cup and you can hear them.

Well somebody took the idea a little bit further and create the analog phone. They said you know what. It can’t go so far maybe 100 feet or so let’s use instead of vibrations of the string, let’s use electric signals meaning: I am going to use the properties of electricity. And you’ve probably seen things like this as you are speaking your voice is been converted to an electric signal and the phone in the other end says ok based on that frequency of electricity  I am gonna play this sound and that sound and that kind of puts out together. Well the problem with analog signaling is that you only go so far with electrical signal before gets weaker and weaker and weaker and they have to put these amplifications units in there and that makes it strong again but then it introduces line noise and you just can go that far.

So, along comes the invention of the digital phone, that’s where the nyquist theory came from and instead of using electrical signals to represent your voice they use numbers, eight thousand of those a second. It’s amazing so as you speak your voices actually put against the same kind of electric charge but they assign a number to it, they say ok well let’s say you say the word cow C-O-W takes about a second, its eight thousand numbers that’s going to represent the word cow you know maybe number thirty represents the sound or something like that and now you have digital phones in the beauty is that now you have these numbers you can send as far as you want and you don’t have any degradation on signal that where PBX systems came about and so on. So, voice or IP what is it? Well it’s just taking those numbers, here is the number 30 representing the sound of word COW and putting tcp headers on it, to where I say here is the source ip address of one device and here is a destination IP of another device. That’s it, so now I am taking eight thousand numbers a second and sending them over the internet or some kind of data network with little TCP IP headers on it saying this is the source device maybe an IP phone and this is the destination device maybe it’s a computer, so you may say, well if that’s it if that’s all we are really doing  is taking these fancy vibrations that we call sound converting them into a numbers that represent the sound and sending them across a network while the hoopla about voice-over IP. Ah, that’s another question. Why Voice over IP is what you are asking at that point. Well, we have some time, let’s squeeze it in here. The reason why we do voice over IP is because we can be more efficient so first off instead of sending 8 thousand numbers a second we can use different codacs, now there are some codacs, now codacs stand for code-decoder, there are some codecs that use same old 8 thousand numbers a second  and squeeze them all into a packets and then know that is like a  g dot seven eleven codac, most popular product that is out there, but there is other ones like say g seven twenty nine that smooshy down, so I can be more efficient that I was back in a day. I mean think about it, I’d say the word COW and it takes a second. Do I really need 8 thousand numbers to do that, I mean where most of those eight thousand numbers be the same number if I am just saying the word COW. So we can be more efficient with voice over IP. Second off you get a single cabling infrastructure instead of having to run separate wires    from your analog phones or your digital phones and have a totally different set of staff that manages those wires. Benefit number two. Now we have Ethernet cable is the same cable we use for our computers that we plugin here. We have the same IT department that now is able to manage the phones as well. We are using well know protocols like TCP IP that everyone knows, everyone loves to do this so it becomes a lot more compatible so I don’t have to have for instance Cisco phones, I could have other vendors phones, it is kind of like have dell laptops apple laptops say they communicating together because they all use TCP IP. You can combine the internet connection and your voice all in one line. It is like a huge number of benefits but international that’s what Voice over IP is. I hope this have been informative for you, thank you for viewing.      

Tags: voice over ip, what is voip, voice ip, voice internet, digital phones.

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