What you need to know about VoIP phone service

The rising buzzword in the Internet community, nowadays, is VoIP phone. What does it mean? How does it affect your life or business? VoIP stands for Voice over Internet Protocol, and that means a phone service that uses broadband Internet connectivity to dial and connect.

Using residential VoIP phone services can help customers save hundred to thousands of dollars on monthly residential phone bills. Business VoIP providers like Jive^TM or Nextiva^TM can help you save even more on your monthly business phone bill.

VoIP providers are competing against each other to bring you the best VoIP plans and we want to help you make an informed decision before you select a VoIP plan that best fits your needs.

How Does VoIP Work?

VoIP phone service (Voice over IP; also known as digital phone service, digital telephony, or broadband phone) replaces your phone line with a high-speed Internet connection. It's that simple.

While traditional telephone service compresses your voice into a frequency on a wire, VoIP compresses the sound of your voice into packets of data (ones & zeros). In milliseconds, these data packets are sent over the Internet. When the data reaches the final destination, it is converted back to sound. When you use VoIP to call someone on the traditional phone network (the "PSTN" or Public Switched Telephone Network), the VoIP call is converted to sound once it reaches the network and the call is routed normally. The difference is that you've paid a lot less for that call.  It is important to note that most calls over the PSTN networks go over the internet at some point.

The diagrams below will show you how VoIP calls are routed in specific situations. The last diagram shows the most typical call path: phone-to-phone. This is what your call path will look like when it's routed by a VoIP company, such as Phone Power or ITP, to the PSTN.