How voice over IP telephony is changing the face of telecommunications?

Facing the constantly changing trends in global telecommunications industry, IP telephony had been and has been proved exceptionally promising and profitable for small business as well as larger businesses. Facing an increasingly competitive global communications market, existing Internet service providers (ISPs), telephone companies (TCs), PTTs (postal authorities, telephone and telegraph organizations), and emerging competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) are constantly seeking ways to increase their communication service offerings and to provide improved quality of service to their end users.

In the recent years with the development of communication technology, IP telephony has caught the attention of many global telephone service providers by offering a wide range of new telecommunication services while reducing cost of infrastructure. Also, Voice over IP (VoIP) is changing the paradigm of access to information by merging data, voice, multimedia functions, and facsimile functions into a single converged access infrastructure.

It has only been made possible with the introduction of IP telephony that service providers are able to offer basic voice services expanded via the Internet including features like web commerce, Internet call waiting, and interactive multimedia communications. These services are integrated uninterruptedly to existing public switched telephone networks (PSTNs) to allow calls originating or terminating on traditional phones as needed.

Moreover, because Internet protocol is an open standard, voice over Internet protocol has been able to give service providers the flexibility to customize their existing services and implement new and fast services at much more efficient costs than before not only in urban locales but also in remote areas within their region.

Voice over IP converts voice signals into data packets and these are easily transported across Internet data networks instead of traditional telephone lines. The evolution of circuit switched data transmission to packet-based data transmission has placed VoIP in the categories of well-provisioned IP networks. The voice signals encapsulated into IP packets can be transported as native IP or IP over Ethernet or ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) or voice over Frame Relay or SONET (synchronous optical networking).

Not only this but today, interoperable VoIP architecture is based on H.323 v2 specification that defines gateways (telephony interfaces with the network) and switching components in order to suggest how to identify, route, and terminate calls over Internet. Also, with the advent of IP telephony and International Program for the Development of Communication (IPDC), many latest specifications are able to be developed like SGCP (simple gateway control protocol) and SIP (session initiation protocol), which serve extensions to VoIP services with respect to call control and signaling helping build the best next generation voice over IP architecture.