Many people ask, “What is Voice over IP and what are the advantages of having VoIP?”

Let’s start by answering the first question.  Simply stated, VoIP is Voice over Internet Protocol.  For those of us that are not necessarily uber techies, that means that rather than transmitting and receiving telephone calls over a single pair of copper wires, your voice is converted to data, or coded, and transmitted over the Internet and then converted back, or decoded, so that you hear the voice that was originally sent. That may sound like an over simplification, but for the sake of this discussion, hopefully, it will suffice.

Voice over IP has multiple advantages over traditional telecommunications. The advantages include, but are not limited to:

• Major cost savings over traditional services
• Ease of implementation and maintenance
• Mobility of equipment
• Variety of choices of equipment
• Extensive availability of features
• Integration with other software and applications
• Ability to share network facilities
• Ease of deployment and management of multiple sites