If you've not been living under a rock the past few years, you've probably seen advertisements for Vonage, a VoIP Service Provider known as Vonage which offers a box that, in addition to the Internet connection, allows you to make unlimited long distance calls to US and Canada at a very low flat cost. There are other VOIP service providers like Skype with various pricing plans.
Image Source: Google
VoIP is the abbreviation in the form of Voice Over Internet Protocol, and it digitally transforms the voice of your client into packets that are sent over the Internet similar to how emails are broken down into packets before being sent via the Internet.
The advantage of VOIP is that it's different from the traditional telephone network that was switched where calls were routed via individual switches, which required a large infrastructure from the phone companies which meant that they had to charge per minute.
But, during the boom in telecoms of the 1990s, each major company in the world laid fiber-optic lines, and then switched to a packet-driven approach which drastically reduced their operational costs, but at the expense of an enormous investment initially in the latest technology.
A discussion on VOIP is not complete without discussing one of the most important aspects that determine the success that affects VOIP technology. The gating element is that a reliable VOIP connection and conversations depend in large part on the reliability of your high-speed Internet connection.