VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol)

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is a methodology and group of technologies for delivering voice communications and multimedia sessions over Internet Protocol (IP) networks such as the Internet. The terms Internet telephony, broadband telephony, and broadband phone service specifically refer to the provisioning of communications services (voice, fax, SMS, voice messaging) over the public Internet, rather than via the public switched telephone network (PSTN), also known as plain old telephone service (POTS). The steps and principles involved in originating VoIP telephone calls are similar to traditional digital telephony and involve signaling, channel setup, digitization of the analog voice signals, and encoding. Instead of being transmitted over a circuit-switched network, the digital information is packetized and transmission occurs as IP packets over a packet-switched network. SIP is one of the main protocols involved in VoIP, and is used for connection management. See Melrose Labs Inbound Voice and CloudPBX.