If you've been curious about the difference between a VoiceOver 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 inthe 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 tomake a call. It comes out over copper usually into what's called a CO or acentral office. At that point, this analog call is converted to digital as withthis conversion mark is and then it goes through a proprietary network and yousee here I've written etc., etc., because it can make a number of jumpsdepending on who your carrier is,who they've leased facilities from, what thetime of the day is, what the optimum routing cost is. The point is, these areall dedicated facilities for the private network until, you know, if you'recalling from San Francisco to New York, you get to the central office in NewYork where you're trying to dial. At that point, the call is converted backfrom 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 notefficient.
So how is Voice over IP different? Start down here. You havea phone call and then it's converted to the Internet Protocol and that caneither be done in the phone itself or in a switch in your building. But thepoint is, it gets converted and then it just rides into the Internet. It justgoes in here and I have no dedicated facilities because there aren't any. Itrides the same infrastructure because this phone call is broken down intopackets 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 convertedbased on who you're using for this Internet phone call at the far side, at acentral office so that it could ride copper back to the other side. So you cansee the difference. Here, lots of dedicated, lots of nailed up facilities,inherently less efficient. This uses an existing infrastructure, which sendsmillions of data packets across the Internet every second. This is the way ofthe future, more efficient.
