VoIP - 1

Background
Last Thursday, I gave a speech at the Toastmaster's meeting on VoIP. The speech project was to research a topic and then talk about it.

It was supposed to be a 5-7 min speech. I planned on taking 1-2 minutes to give a brief explanation of what VoIP means. The rest of the time was to be spent introducing the audience to 3 or 4 VoIP services which are available in the market right now, to demonstrate how VoIP makes a difference in our lives. The audience was perfect for this topic - not one of them had a VoIP phone line in their homes. I thought that at the end of my speech, they would all be really inpsired to check out VoIP and benefit from it. Boy, was my speech a disaster!

As it turned out, the explanation of the theory behind VoIP took up most of my time. When you are giving a speech, time can fly real fast. I did not have much time at all to talk about the VoIP products/services I was going to show the audience. Even if I had the time, it would not have turned out all that great because my laptop would not connect to the projector. I was going to show them the features of the VoIP services on the screen for maximum effect. As it turned out, I learnt during the feedback that people did not even know that VoIP was related to their telephone service or usage.
They thought I was giving a speech on a theoretical technology that was way out there and did not affect their daily lives in any way! Repeat: what a disaster!

But I can see opportunity in this disaster. Two opportunities in fact. One opportunity is my next speech whose objective is to 'persuade with power'. I think I can show the audience these great VoIP products/services and persuade them to check them out, and perhaps, even use them. The other opportunity is, of course, to write this blog post as a way to gather my speech material.

VoIP Technology
VoIP stands for Voice over Internet Protocol. To put it in very simplistic terms, VoIP is the technology which is used to transport voice over the Internet. In VoIP, a person's voice signals are converted into digital packets, which are then sent over the Internet to the destination. At a very high level, it is not much different from sending textual data, such as emails. What this means is that, like most Internet traffic, there is no synchronous connection between the sender and receiver of voice data. The modern Internet channels are so fast and efficient that despite this asynchronous transfer of voice data, the data packets still manage to be gathered and re-assembled quickly enough at the receivers end, so that the receiver gets a signal which makes sense and is of great quality. In fact, the best quality voice conversations I have had between the US and India has consistently been over VoIP connections, and not the traditional phone lines.

The traditional telephone systems are called circuit-switched systems. In simplistic terms, in the traditional system, a synchronous, continuous circuit/connection is established between the sender and receiver of the voice signals. In the olden days, this continuous connection was made of copper wires. These days, we have all kinds of cables from copper to fibre optic cables, and traditional telephone signals are even sent over satellite.

The difference between traditional circuit-switched telephone systems and VoIP can be understood at a high-level through the analogy of the railways and roadways. Rail transportation requires that there be a continuous railway line between the point of origin and the destination. There is not much flexibility in the route. Even the containers used for transportation (the boxcars of the train) have rigidly defined size, shape standards. If there is a problem along the railway line, it can hold up traffic for a long time. The amount of railway lines and the places where they are available is quite limited. Compared to that the roadways are so much more flexible. There are many combinations of streets you can take from origin to destination. If there are accidents or problems along one route, you can take a different route. The size and types of vehicles you can use to transport goods over roadways are too numerous to list. The road network is extensive and almost unlimited to most places where people live.

The fact that voice signals are converted to digital data packets in VoIP is important. What that means is that the data packets can now be processed and manipulated by computers and newer digital phones, in ways that were never possible with the older phones.

It is also signifant that the voice data is transported over the Internet, instead of over regular telephone lines. What this implies is that the provider of the VoIP telephone service need not overly concern themselves about the route the voice signal takes from the sender to the receiver. They don't have to spend lot of time, effort and money in leasing bandwidth on telephone lines from the point of origin to the destination. They don't have to be concerned about providing a connecting line to each of their telephone subscribers. All that the telephone subscribers need to have is a high-speed Internet connection. All that the VoIP service providers need is a big enough connection to the Internet to send and receives voice data from all their customers. Of course, the VoIP service provider also needs to be connected to the traditional phone network to be able to provide connections between their VoIP customers and the users of regular phone lines. But this is a relatively smaller concern, compared to being concerned about the their entire network from the point of origin to the destination.

The two factors - manipulating voice data packets with computers and the telephone service providers not having to concern themselves too much about the entire telephone network - result in some great advantages and features to us, the regular telephone users. Those features, along with examples of VoIP products and services which offer them, will be presented in my next post on VoIP. Look out for that post to start taking advantage of these features yourself.