VoIP vs. Traditional Telephony

If you've been curious about the difference between a Voice Over IP phone call and a traditional telephone call, you're in the right place.

Let's start with the regular phone call or what they call in the telecom industry, believe it or not, POTS, Plain Old Telephone Service. Here's how it starts. You pick up a phone here at this end. You're going to make a call. It comes out over copper usually into what's called a CO or a central office. At that point, this analog call is converted to digital as with this conversion mark is and then it goes through a proprietary network and you see here I've written etc., etc., because it can make a number of jumps depending on who your carrier is,who they've leased facilities from, what the time of the day is, what the optimum routing cost is. The point is, these are all dedicated facilities for the private network until, you know, if you're calling from San Francisco to New York, you get to the central office in New York where you're trying to dial. At that point, the call is converted back from digital to analog and it's sent out over usually copper, sometimes fiber, but usually copper to the far side. It's worked for a 100 years but it's not efficient.

So how is Voice over IP different? Start down here. You have a phone call and then it's converted to the Internet Protocol and that can either be done in the phone itself or in a switch in your building. But the point is, it gets converted and then it just rides into the Internet. It just goes in here and I have no dedicated facilities because there aren't any. It rides the same infrastructure because this phone call is broken down into packets and is treated like any other data that's sent across the Internet, whether it's an e-mail or whether it's an MP3 file or a Word document, a PDF, whatever. It just rides like anything else.

The only other piece of the mystery is it gets converted based on who you're using for this Internet phone call at the far side, at a central office so that it could ride copper back to the other side. So you can see the difference. Here, lots of dedicated, lots of nailed up facilities, inherently less efficient. This uses an existing infrastructure, which sends millions of data packets across the Internet every second. This is the way of the future, more efficient.