What Is Internet Telephony?
Simply put, Internet telephony lets you make real-time voice, fax
and even video calls over the Internet. Many small businesses are
experimenting with Internet telephony, mainly because it can
significantly reduce telecommunications costs.
You might also hear it called voice over IP (VoIP) or voice over
the Internet (VoI). A somewhat synonymous term, IP telephony most
commonly refers to voice calls routed over a private intranet or wide
area network (WAN), as opposed to the public Internet.
Making Calls over the Internet
There are some major differences between making a regular phone call
and an Internet call. First, to make a phone call over the Internet,
you need a multimedia computer with at least a 28.8 Kbps Internet
connection, a sound card, speakers and a microphone. Installing a
specialized PC audio card, will improve the quality of the connection
and let you use a telephone handset for Internet calls.
Second, with regular phone calls, your voice travels over the
Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), a circuit-switched network
that creates a dedicated, and thus high-quality, connection between
you and the person you're calling. With Internet telephony, your voice
travels over the Internet, which is a packet-switched network. And
since packet-switched networks were designed to carry data (as opposed
to real-time communications), calls might experience delays and
distortion.
Third, when making a regular telephone call, you're charged
according to the distance and duration of the call. When you make a
call over the Internet, distance and duration are not important, your
Internet service provider merely charges you a low, fixed-rate price
for your Internet bandwidth. For this low price, it's not surprising
that you get a lower-quality call than over the telephone.
Telephony Software and Services
Although you need specialized software to make Internet calls, there
are a number of free or inexpensive Internet-telephony products.
Internet-telephony software traditionally used proprietary techniques,
which meant that both you and the person you were calling needed to
have the same software, but some vendors are now adopting a standard
protocol. Still, unless you have a dedicated connection to the
Internet and continuously run your telephony software, you have to
schedule the call ahead of time.
The Pros and Cons of Internet Telephony
The main advantage of Internet telephony is that you can call
anywhere in the world without incurring excessive long-distance
telephone charges. But Internet telephony has other selling points you
may not know about.
Voice and data convergence.
Internet telephony merges data and voice on to a single network to
create revolutionary ways of communicating. For instance, innovative
customer service and e-commerce applications let Web surfers click a
button and talk with a customer service or sales representative.
Advanced conferencing and whiteboarding applications let users in
remote offices share data and talk to each other in real time. And
unified messaging applications let telecommuters and business
travelers receive all their messages - including voice, email and fax
- in a single in-box.
Internet faxing.
Sending faxes from your computer instead of a fax machine spares you
the expense of dedicated fax lines, fax machines and supplies, and
long-distance charges. It's also faster: You can transmit a fax in
less than half the time it takes to send one manually. To top it off,
online-fax software electronically archives your faxes. Check out the
free service form eFax.
Better than PBX.
Small and medium-size businesses can use Internet telephony to link
their branch offices into a virtual private telephone network.
Such solutions typically cost less than setting up and administrating
a traditional analog PBX system.
Cons
Despite these advantages, there are several drawbacks to using
Internet telephony for business purposes:
Poor-quality connections.
The biggest problem for Internet telephony is that the Internet was
designed for non-real-time services, such as email and file transfer,
which don't require a guaranteed QoS (quality of service). Therefore,
telephone calls that travel over the Internet can suffer from echoes
and distortion, especially during peak usage periods. However, in a
private intranet, Internet telephony creates connections that are
almost as good as those you would get through the regular telephone
network.
A PC is not a phone.
A multimedia PC just isn't as good as a regular old telephone. For
instance, you can't pace around. The microphone picks up the sounds of
whatever is going on around you, and some microphones and speakers
have difficulties switching between talk and listen. Fortunately,
several products are available that let you plug a regular telephone
handset into your computer.
Lack of standardization.
Until recently, most Internet telephony products were based on
proprietary technologies, so two parties who wanted to connect would
need to run the same software. Most products aren't currently
compatible with each other because industry standards have only
recently been established.
