Technology is growing and changing everyday. Consider phone service; at one time when people made telephone calls they did so with their phone attached to a jack in the wall and literally “dialed” the number they were calling. Then came the push-button phones; it was great to quickly “dial” the number by pressing the key pad. Soon the cordless phone jumped on the technological scene. This was wonderful; now people could walk around their house and talk without being limited to the phone cord attached to the wall, or worse tripping over the one hundred foot phone cord that they used to walk all around the house and talk on the phone.
Just as people were getting used to the cordless phone, soon came the invention of the mobile phone. It was cumbersome at first but what a thought – being able to use a phone in your vehicle. Now the cell phone is sleek, compact, and can do much more than simply make a call. Enter Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) – Internet phone service, how does VoIP work with your current phone?
With this technology, instead of the signals going out over a public network the voice signals travel over your high-speed broadband connection. You do not need to buy a new phone for this service, and you can enjoy substantial savings as you combine both the Internet and phone service into one low monthly rate. The amazing concept of VoIP is that it combines one technology to operate two different types of service; your phone and Internet. Making a call with VoIP technology can occur one of three ways:
* Analog Telephone Adapter (ATA) – With the use of this device, you simply plug in your current phone into the adapter and then connect the adapter to your broadband service (possibly a modem). That is it you can now make calls. The way this system works is by taking the analog signal and changing it into a digital signal sent out over the Internet.
* IP Phones – these types of phones look exactly like analog phones the difference being they have an Ethernet connector instead of the standard phone connector and come equipped with the software and hardware needed for VoIP service built into them. You connect directly to your modem and begin enjoying exceptional quality with your next phone call.
* Computer-to-Computer – All you need for this service is high-speed Internet connections, sound card, microphone, and speakers. Typically, you pay a monthly rate from your Internet service provider.
By: Mike Singh
Posts Tagged ‘Voice Signals’
How Does VoIP Work With Your Current Phone?
March 21st, 2010Challenges of VOIP in 2007
March 16th, 2010
Today average customer uses Voice over internet protocol (VoIP) which is latest trend in communication industry. The technology is rapidly advancing because all telecommunication product companies are now investing fund to have more improved VoIP products and services.
This year the VOIP market has picked up. Many corporate have started using VoIP and have realized a large savings of 52-percent or more off their phone bills. Use of wireless VoIP helped hospitals to reduce cost of mobile phones. Technologically VoIP is better than pagers and hence it is getting popular in nursing homes and hospitals.
What are the disadvantages of Voice over Internet Protocol?
VoIP is becoming very popular to business houses but it is still not very popular to residential segment. The qualities of VoIP services are inferior to the quality of call in regular telephone technology due to various reasons.
VOIP technology requires a large amount of data to be compressed and transmitted in a packet format, then uncompressed and delivered, all in a relatively small amount of time. This digitization of analog voice signals takes too long and the callers experience either echo or over-talk.
Regular phone calls function with a delay of no more than ten( 10) milliseconds whereas in the case VOIP the delay is up to 400 milliseconds, meaning that the callers won’t hear each other fast enough to make the conversation flow easily. Due to this delay, either callers will hear themselves talking or they will start talking again before they have heard the other person reply. It is true that this delay problem does not occur for each call.
The disadvantages of VOIP are usually acceptable if the callers are using a free service and the calls are for personal in nature. The degradation of voice quality is not acceptable to corporate houses. Apart from delay in voice conversation, IT security network like firewall sometimes failed to route a VOIP call once it is received.
Moreover, if several people use VoIP, bandwidth utilization also increases. Excess use of bandwidth also increases the infrastructural cost.
By: Arindam Chattopadhyaya
VoIP Technologies in the Philippines
March 7th, 2010
In today’s global change in technology, a lot depend on how to make everything possible and easily done in a fastest and effective way of communication. Choosing good equipment tool in a call center industry is something that will be given a top priority. If you want your call center business to be on top of the competition then you have to check the kind of tools for you to stay on this business.
This article will discuss about VoIP (Voice-over-Internet Protocol), its importance and how its work to your contact center industry. Many are still do not have sufficient idea how this technology help you in maintaining quality calls overseas. I have to say that the company I work for is known to be expert in providing pieces of information to any form of services like in an off-shore business. Based on the article wrote by Beau Rudd, chief executive officer of Unique Interaction, he outlined the straight definition of VoIP. Mr. Rudd is a wizard in a call center arena since he had been working in call center at the age of 17. I admit that I am not pretty much “knowledgeable” about this technology nor how is this work but Mr. Rudd’s idea helps me a lot to fully understand this technology.
It is no doubt that the Philippines is one of the leaders in using VoIP services, as the country is known to be the key leaders in outsourcing. Call center owners are very particular when it comes to the money they spent for their business to succeed. Venturing to call center is a serious matter. This is not just spending money and losing it in such a careless way. Better solutions to the concerns of the customers is a way of proving to your clients that they are important.
WHAT IS VoIP?
Let me start first defining VoIP – it is the ability of an IP network to carry telephone voice signals as IP packets in compliance with International Telecommunications Union Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) specification H.323. VoIP enables a router to transmit telephone calls and faxes over the Internet with no loss in functionality, reliability, or voice quality. Another translation of this term is a category of hardware and software that enables people to use the Internet as the transmission medium for telephone calls. Voice data is sent in packets using rather than by traditional POTS circuits. One advantage of VoIP is that the telephone calls over the Internet do not incur a surcharge beyond what the user is paying for Internet access, much in the same way that the user doesn’t pay for sending individual e-mails over the Internet.
HOW IT WORKS?
Majority of the telecommunication companies in the Philippines are using VoIP to streamline their networks through routing the phone calls from a circuit switch and into an IP gateway. Once the call is received by a gateway on the other side of the call, it is decompressed, reassembled and routed to a local circuit switch. Today, more and more companies particularly call centers are installing VoIP system. IP telephony just makes sense, in terms of both economics and infrastructure requirements. With VoIP, you can make a call from anywhere you have broadband connectivity. Since the IP phones broadcast their info over the Internet, they can be administered by the provider anywhere there is a connection.
Mr. Rudd, on the other hand, disclosed that his company offers attractive package to any of the interested investors who will venture in a call center. He said that VoIP is one of the backbone for the contact centers industry because it is guaranteed that many software developers believe that this service have a great future in helping the industry survive from any possible changes of the technologies in the future. He stressed that with his predictive dialer, you have to capability to:
Do real time monitoring of your agents Do Outbound, Inbound and Blended campaigns Do predictive, progressive and power dialing Do Remote monitoring Do full and/or on demand recording Do call barging, conference and internal/external call transfer CRM IVR Voicemail Call Conferencing Your own phone extension Your own toll free number for your account
The effect of having quality service increase their sales and no complains from the clients who became his business partners when the company starts to outsource up to now. VoIP will help you save a lot of money particularly in telephoning to the mainland US. The benefits of this service is that international and long distance VoIP charges are much cheaper. Depending on the package or service that you select, you will either get unlimited or a set number of minutes for North America (US & Canada) long distance calling. It simply means, that any international calls are significantly lower from VoIP providers than traditional phone companies, although the differences between the providers are vast.
It is expected that within the next following years this technologies will continue to provide a great impact to the off-shore business in the Philippines and the rest of the world.
By: Roberto Bacasong
