Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP)

VoIP for small business bundles phone, data, and video into one unified service so you can do more with less. Now you can enjoy the speed, flexibility, and security of unified communications on your own network. Azure Services Inc. offers VoIP for small business solutions that are just your size.

VoIP for small business is an important part of your unified communications solution

Before we get started, let's go over some key terms:

1. "VoIP" (voice over IP) lets you make phone calls over an IP data network.
2. "Unified communications" from Cisco takes VoIP for small business a step further. It helps you combine all of your communications-including voice, data, and video-into a secure, inexpensive, easy-to-manage solution with lots of great features.

Voice over Internet Protocol (Voice over IP, VoIP and IP telephony) is a methodology and group of technologies for the delivery of 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).

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, however, the digital information is packetized, and transmission occurs as IP packets over a packet-switched network. Such transmission entails careful considerations about resource management different from time-division multiplexing (TDM) networks. Early providers of voice-over-IP services offered business models and technical solutions that mirrored the architecture of the legacy telephone network. Second-generation providers, such as Skype, have built closed networks for private user bases, offering the benefit of free calls and convenience while potentially charging for access to other communication networks, such as the PSTN. This has limited the freedom of users to mix-and-match third-party hardware and software. Third-generation providers, such as Google Talk, have adopted[1] the concept of federated VoIP—which is a departure from the architecture of the legacy networks. These solutions typically allow dynamic interconnection between users on any two domains on the Internet when a user wishes to place a call.