Ready for VoIP phone calls?

The number of households subscribing to VoIP has increased quite rapidly in the last few years. Apparently, VoIP is either replacing or complementing existing traditional landline services.

Traditionally, long distance services flowed over to “trunk lines” and a huge fee was incurred to cover the costs. Now, the same can be achieved by paying a reasonable flat fee as part of your VoIP phone service, utilizing your computer.

VoIP (Voice over Internet protocol) is a family of technologies that is used to deliver voice communications and multimedia sessions over an Internet Protocol (IP) network, such as the internet, instead of using the conventional phone lines. All you need is a computer with a broadband connection, a router, a microphone, or headset and you are ready to make your long distance and even local calls at very low prices. Not only are the prices light on your pocket, VoIP has other benefits as well:

• With VoIP, you can have multi-party and conference calls, quality of which is far superior to the conventional 2-way calling services with fixed and mobile phones. Consequently, VoIP works great for businesses that have worldwide clients and need to communicate with them on a frequent basis.
• VoIP services travel with you; this is because all you need is a computer, whether it be in a cafe, a library, a hotel, and a broadband connection sufficient for using VoIP. Using VoIP turns out to be much cheaper than the rates of hotel room phones or long distance and roaming charges on your cell phones.

VoIP has many additional features such as call waiting, caller ID, call forwarding, three-way mail, etc. and is also capable of making data calls which makes use of broadband to send international faxes at much lower rates and at a faster speed.

Looks like VoIP is the new wave in telecommunication history which is fast augmenting. But obviously, new technologies aren’t perfect and there is always room for improvement. One of the main problems with VoIP applications is that VoIP phone calls require at least 100Kb or dedicated bandwidth and without this, you may find your phone calls less than satisfactory.