Lingo Promotions Blog

A lot of people still ask us what VoIP is and why so many people are changing to it. This is a great question, and it gives us an opportunity to shed some light on this new and exciting technology.

Let’s start with good old fashioned phone lines, the ones you knew about growing up. The telephone company had to run phone cables to your house or apartment, and there was a utility box outside that routed the main line into the different rooms in your house. Houses and apartments were built with phone jacks in every room so you could have a phone in every room. That was nice, but this 2008, and so much has changed since then!

The old system, also known as POTS - “Plain Old Telephone System” (no, really, that’s what it stands for!) was the only way to have a phone in your home. Most people didn;t even have a choice as to which phone company they could use, and therefore had to pay whatever fees were asked by the phone company. True, the government regulated it for a time, but all that seemed to do was raise fees, and we ended up paying the same or even more than before!

Then came cell phones. Sure lots of people have them nowadays, but what if you only have so many minutes a month and like to talk for hours from home? And would you feel comfortable giving out your cell phone number to all of the banks and companies that require a “home phone number”? I didn’t think so.

Enter VoIP, or Voice over IP. This is also considered voice telephony, but most will call it VoIP. How do you say it? Many people spell it out: “V-O-I-P”, and some reduce it to a single syllable and pronounce it as it looks: “voip”, and the occasional “Voice over I-P”. Either way, if you tell people you use VoIP, they will know that you are not only internet-savvy, but also financially smart. By far, VoIP is the least expensive way to make phone calls, ever.

See, what VoIP does is piggy-back onto your existing internet connection. Almost everyone has broadband now, which means they can access the internet at high speeds. Some people still use dial-up like at NetZero, which can be OK if you set it up right. But it is recommended that you use a broadband connection for best results.

VoIP hardware (a small box on your home network) takes your voice and converts it to a digital data stream and sends it over to the VoIP server, which then converts it back to audio and sends it over to the person you are calling. It sounds kind of complicated, and yes, there are some very big and expensive computers involved, BUT so many people are on board now with this technology that the entire process has been streamlined and it is easy to setup and use for everyone with an internet connection.

For more information on how VoIP works, visit our main site.