The Once and Future VOIP

You have probably heard the term VOIP, or “Voice Over IP” a lot lately and wondered what it means. VOIP, at its most basic, means using the internet to make a telephone call. That’s what it is, now you can wonder whether or not it’s good or bad, and why someone would want to use or pay for it.

To be precise, VOIP is a generic term that refers to any telephone signal that is translated into data packets, sent across a network, and then translated back into audio. To make things more clear, let’s look at the VOIP process, but without the technology. Imagine you want to say something to your friend using your computer and the internet. You use your microphone to record a sound into your computer, attach the file to an e-mail, and send it to him. He opens the file, listens to it, records his response, and sends it back to you through e-mail. This, in a nutshell is what VOIP is, but done automatically and a lot faster.

To get to the essence of what VOIP is, you must first understand what “Internet Protocol,” or “IP” is. This Internet Protocol was developed by Xerox Parc and a government agency known as DARPA, back in the 1970s and is the driving force behind the Internet. Because of their work, anyone could access another computer from anywhere. You simply had to have a connection to the “backbone” of the Internet using IP.

To get to that other computer, there may be 30 or 40 routers and about a dozen computers between you and the computer you want to talk to and you have to “hop” through each of them to get to your destination. Each of these hops introduces a phenomenon known as latency, which slows down the traffic some. Generally speaking, the more hops you go through, the slower your connection is. Latency is created by poor performing routers, outages, or congestion caused by excess traffic.

Now, imagine your voice traveling over this same path, making those “hops!” Every stop along the way can introduce a number of problems in a telephone call, namely a phenomenon known as “jitter.” Jitter is where the sound begins to break up, delays, and/or echos. Despite compensations, each Jitter still reduces the quality of the phone call.

All VOIP traffic is not the same. There are two types of VOIP. One travels over the public Internet, and the second travels over a private or semi-private network. The key difference between the two is the route your voice takes. Let’s say that your office has another branch office in a different part of the country with both offices connected to the public Internet through your corporate headquarters.

Now you want to call someone in the other office using VOIP. Your voice only has five hops to make: one to your router in your office, one to your Internet Service Provider (ISP), one across your ISP’s network, one to the other branch’s router, and finally to the other computer.

Even though your call goes through the public Internet to your ISP, your branch office will most likely use the same ISP, which will route your voice over their lines and their network. Suppose that you want to call someone else though. Your ISPs are most likely not the same and your call will have to hop onto the public Internet, resulting in delays as it goes through high numbers of hops.

Any VOIP traffic that travels over the public Internet is going to have some sort of problem at some point. If you are on a cable modem at home, and the kid next door is downloading a significant volume of music from the Internet, then your connection will be slow and you will have a poor quality VOIP call. If you are connecting from your office to another company, and the Internet connection that you are using is congested, then you will experience problems.

It is important to note that bandwidth and latency are two very different things. You can have a super fast Internet connection, but if you are 25 hops away from your caller, then you probably won’t have a good VOIP call.
There have been recent introductions of “free” calling services, such as Skype and Yahoo Messenger Voice. These VOIP calls use the public internet and are of poor quality, but they could cause more problems as well. Recently, the US Congress has begun discussing a concept known as “net neutrality,” which would make every packet of information traveling across the Internet to be treated equally. Currently, we have a “tiered” system, providing a better performance for people willing to pay for it. Most of the free providers suffer from a tiered system, in which a router discard or delay “free” packets.

The theory is that if enough people continue to deluge the internet with “free” traffic communication --voice and video -- the bandwidth will not be there for people who use the Internet for traditional uses, such as surfing the web, playing games online, etc. The ISPs have based their pricing model on a certain usage pattern, and they are seeing these patterns changing.

Eventually, these people will realize what most of us already know: you get what you pay for. Name one other free service that you get where you don’t have to suffer through either some kind of advertisement (such as television and “free” websites), or pay for a service (such as cable TV movie channels and a fee-based website). There’s always a catch, and for right now, the catch is quality. You get what you pay for.