Internet phone (VoIP)

Internet telephony, or IP telephony, refers to a process through which audio information corresponding to spoken words is digitized and transmitted/received from a remote location using the Internet for at least a portion of a route to/from that remote location. The proliferation of large-scale inter-connected computer networks, such as the Internet, as well as advances in the field of speech digitization, has made Internet telephony a reality. The advances in data compression technology have enabled transmission of voice conversations over digital networks, such as the internet or private digital networks. This is accomplished by providing at least two users with access to the internet and with computer hardware and internet telephony software. Internet telephony makes use of the global connection of the Internet as an alternative voice carrier to enable that voice communications be carried out between different locations around the world. Internet telephony presents an attractive alternative for long distance telephone calls, as compared to the public switched telephone network (PSTN), which has been the traditional transmission medium. The cost of Internet telephony anywhere in the world is potentially the cost of a local telephone call to the local Internet telephony provider at one end and the cost of a local call from an Internet telephony service provider at the far end to the destination telephone. The use of a data network, and the transmission of the telephone call using packet switching techniques rather than circuit switching techniques as in conventional telephony, allows a variety of value added services to be implemented. In Internet telephony system, a VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) technology is used for integrating the voice communications with data communications. The VoIP technology is that the voice is converted into a frame at an interval of a short time according to a network layer protocol used in the Internet, i.e., on the network having the IP (IP network), and a packet assembled by adding an IP header to the frame is transmitted and received.