What is VOIP? (voice over internet protocal)?

Question by leela: What is VOIP? (voice over internet protocal)?
I always here people talking about VOIP, and im also starting a business and i heard VOIP is the best but im not 100% sure of what it is.

Best answer:

Answer by CB
It is using your internet connection to make/receive phonecalls.
So for your business, if you have DSL or broad IP provider, and you have phone line thru them, it will use the your IP provider’s data lines for phones, not traditional phone lines.
Advantage – Huge bandwidth.

Definition:
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is a general term for a family of transmission technologies for delivery of voice communications over IP networks such as the Internet or other packet-switched networks. Other terms frequently encountered and synonymous with VoIP are IP telephony, Internet telephony, voice over broadband (VoBB), broadband telephony, and broadband phone.

Internet telephony refers to communications services—voice, facsimile, and/or voice-messaging applications—that are transported via the Internet, rather than the public switched telephone network (PSTN). The basic steps involved in originating an Internet telephone call are conversion of the analog voice signal to digital format and compression/translation of the signal into Internet protocol (IP) packets for transmission over the Internet; the process is reversed at the receiving end.[1]

VoIP systems employ session control protocols to control the set-up and tear-down of calls as well as audio codecs which encode speech allowing transmission over an IP network as digital audio via an audio stream. Codec use is varied between different implementations of VoIP (and often a range of codecs are used); some implementations rely on narrowband and compressed speech, while others support high fidelity stereo codecs.

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