VoIP Technology for Non-Techies - How it Can Help Your Small Business

When a Telephone is More Than a Telephone!

With the recent Vonage IPO and flurry of television commercials for new VoIP or "voice-over-IP" services, many are wondering what this new technology is, what it means,and how it can help them.  

VoIP is a very simple concept - instead of sending voice over copper wires and TDM'ing or "time division multiplexing" it (a discussion of which would turn non-technies green); VoIP sends voice out the same way data is sent out from your computer. When you send  an email from your computer to another location, the data is "packetized", or broken into small bits that are then sent the most efficient way over the Internet.  The packets do not arrive in order, but are stored in buffer memory and reordered before they appear as a new email or file on the recipients computer.  Voice data can also be "packetized", but each packet must be reordered with no time delay in order to make sure it sounds right on the other end.  

After ten years of research by many companies, VoIP technology has solved this delay problem among others to provide voice quality that rivals the quality of more traditional approaches, at a fraction of the cost.  

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