Has Telephony Found Its True Calling?
The Technology Simply Stated
Once upon a time, a Scotsman named Alexander Graham Bell called to his assistant, Watson, for help. Watson heard Mr. Bell on an electrical device. From then on, telephone conversations happened on two copper wires that formed a loop or "circuit." The call took the entire bandwidth available.
A century later, give or take, intelligent humans discovered that voice could be transmitted like data. And it could be sent through the same "plumbing" on a network. Meanwhile, another life-changing advancement happened. An Englishman named Tim Berners-Lee invented the world's largest computer network, the World Wide Web or Internet.
Now, your voice, a sequence of sound waves, can be sampled and converted to a series of electronic or optical pulses, 1 (pulse present) or 0 (pulse absent). These pulses are assembled into bunches and labeled with other data digits so that devices on the network know where to send them. They're called "packets."
Unlike the closed loop of a traditional call, these packets can traverse any number of pathways across the Internet, side by side with all kinds of other packetized data, and be reassembled by an endpoint device. The language or "protocol" that directs packet traffic on this enormous network is called Internet Protocol, reduced, as with all technology terms, to "IP." Thus, you have the term "Voice over Internet Protocol" or "VoIP."
The endpoint device-the phone-ultimately converts the digits back to sound waves received as communication by the ear of the remote human you signaled.
The benefit of VoIP is more efficient use of bandwidth, reflected in lower costs, and the ability to add voice to all kinds of other applications, improving productivity and quality of life.
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