Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)
By Basil Okafor
Monday, April 18, 2005

Voice over Internet telephony digitises voice signals and sends them out on the Web. VoIP can be used in a number of different ways, but here is one example:

COMPUTER: VoIP can be used with your broadband connection while surfing the Web at the same time. Some VoIP applications don't require a computer.

PHONE ADAPTOR: Analogue voice is digitised into individual packets on the way out and back to analogue on the receiving end.

CABLE MODEM: Digital voice packets are sent to, and received from, the Web.
Source: AP/IP xStream

Before business trips, Suneet Tuli, a Montreal, Canada CEO, used to leave behind a long list of numbers where he could be reached and told important clients to ring him on his cell phone. The routine was cumbersome and cost him about $800 a month in phone bills.
Now, he has local numbers for New York, London and Mexico City despite no permanent presence in any of those cities. The lines automatically forward to another number that seamlessly transfers to a cell phone with the best rates for wherever he happens to be.

Because Tuli's calls are routed mainly over the Internet instead of the traditional voice network, he can make changes to the elaborate setup simply by visiting a Web site. And he's cut his phone bill by about 80 percent.

"Even though it seems a little complicated, in my mind it's all straight," said Tuli, chief executive of DataWind Inc., a Montreal company that makes handheld Internet-browsing devices.
Tuli is in the Voice-over-Internet vanguard, relying ever more on a technology that is transforming what it means to make a phone call by converting our conversations into little packets of data that traverse the Internet.