VOIP Calls: As simple as dialing

Voice Over IP", or in more common terms, a phone service that is utilized over the Internet. If you have a reasonable quality Internet connection you can get your phone service delivered to you through your Internet connection instead, or as well as, from your local phone company if you still utilize a dial-up ISP. While not always the case, more times than often, the faster your Internet connection the better the quality of the calls. Broadband will obviously perform much better than dial-up in most instances.

One technical feature that is driving VOIP calls is use of the session initiation protocol, or SIP. The definition of "SIP" comes straight from the world of instant messaging, where it is used to connect your teenage daughter to all of her online friends when she is supposed to be doing her homework or cleaning her room. What SIP does for VOIP calls is that it creates peer-to-peer telephone connections anywhere in the world. In other words, the phones talk to each other without the need for any kind of a phone switch in the middle. It is a highly integrated phone system without an actual phone company, and the implications of that change are much more than just profound, to say the very least.

At present, there is no risk of everyone swooping out and buying VOIP phones to make VOIP calls and eliminating the plain old telephone service overnight. However, within the next five years there will indeed be some serious worry on the parts of traditional phone companies as to precisely "how" they will somehow make profits from an antiquated system.