This short blog can be considered a simple description of voice-over IP, how it works, and why it is essential.
Voice over IP, also known as VoIP for short, is taking telephone conversations, routing them through a phone over a network cable into the network, and then out to the Internet. Instead of using the traditional phone network, which is made up of copper wires and central offices and telephone poles, we've taken the entire phone communication concept and moved it over to the network. One of the providers of this service is ShoreTel, and their product ShoreTel VoIP is rapidly changing the landscape of telecommunications.
How VoIP works?
So when you make a phone call, what's happening in the conversation is being routed over the network. How does it do that? It does that because the microphone and receiver in here are working a lot like the same way that an iPod might work or an mp3 player. It's taking the sound and converting it into little bitty messages, or one could almost think of them as tiny bitty mp3 files. Although they're not mp3 files, they're pockets. Taking those little bitty recorded sounds are actually like several times a second sending them over the network as network packets no different than like email or web content. Then, the other phone is opening up those little messages and playing that sound back to you at the far end. So when you speak, it's being recorded as a digital conversation, little bitty packets of recorded information going through the network. When you hear what's happening, the phone receives those little bitty packets of information playing back to you.Why should this matter?
It should matter because, like it or not, this is the direction that the future of telecommunications is going. The old copper plant and even some of the other digital mediums like T1 are going away because of cost. It is way cheaper for international communication.- The ShoreTel VoIP comes in two different ways. Right now, there are premises-based systems which means that all the equipment to run your voice-over IP phone system would live on your premises like in your building, but there's also cloud-based what cloud-based means is that all you need is a switch, and the equipment the phone equipment. You don't need to have any centralized brain or PBX stored on your location because all of the signaling decision-making and processing that's all happening in the cloud or happening in these data centers hosted by these big-name cloud PBX providers such as ShoreTel.
- To conclude, a ShoreTel VoIP allows you to have a phone conversation. However, instead of going over the old phone network now, it's going through the web, going out to the Internet, it's traversing the Internet at some point it might be carried by a carrier for a little bit to reach its final destination. But eventually, even the carriers will become a hundred percent voice-over IP!
