Almost everyone has heard of Skype (News - Alert) at this point, and most businesses know that the underlying technology that enables Skype, voice-over-IP (VoIP), can save money. But few people realize VoIP has been around for decades.
VoIP was invented back in 1973 when the experimental Network Voice Protocol was invented by ARPANET. The first VoIP audio transceiver was not invented and patented until 1989, however, when Alon Cohen and Lior Haramaty invented it for a company called VocalTec (News - Alert).
The first VoIP application appeared in 1991 when Speak Freely was released into the public domain. But it still was too early for VoIP, and it wasn’t until 1995 that the first commercial Internet phone software was released, VocalTec Internet Phone (News - Alert).
It was 2003 when things began changing. That’s when Skype hit the scene. By 2004, mass market VoIP plans began appearing and both consumers and businesses of all types began discovering the benefits of VoIP.
Now roughly 24 percent of America adult Internet users have used VoIP, and 14 percent have used it globally.
This number is higher for smartphone and tablet users, who clearly see the benefit of VoIP. Among this group, 35 percent have a VoIP app installed. The only question is why this number is not even higher, because VoIP delivers a number of benefits.
These benefits include price, portability, a larger feature set and service mobility.
With VoIP, there are more calling features. VoIP delivers features such as the ability to receive calls at any number of designated phones simultaneously, to selectively forward calls, to automatically transcribe voicemail in many cases, and a multitude of other benefits. It leads to unified communications, too, which is the integration of voice with chat, video, collaboration and presence services.
VoIP offers phone portability and mobility, too. The phone device can use the same number virtually anywhere as long as it has proper IP connectivity. The phone service can follow a user wherever he or she goes.
The cost savings is also of course great with VoIP. Consumers and organizations can save up to 60 percent on calling, according to some estimates, with unlimited calling often running only $20 per month while traditional telephony costs between $35 and $45 per month.
There are good reasons why VoIP has grown as a technology, and soon VoIP will replace traditional telephony entirely just as the switchboard has gone from women in a room manually patching calls through to the process being automated by a softswitch.
Connecting two calls to each other has gone from a manual process, that switchboard we’ve seen in old photographs, to a softswitch today where software is used to connect calls. The software used today employs a call agent to take care of the call routing and a media agent for moving the actual call as a digital stream.
So VoIP and telephony have come a long way, and the evolution is not over yet.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi