What is VoIP?
What can it do for you -
VoIP and IP telephony are becoming increasingly popular with large corporations and consumers alike. For many people, Internet Protocol (IP) is more than just a way to transport data, it’s also a tool that simplifies and streamlines a wide range of business applications. Telephony is the most obvious example.
VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) is simply the transmission of telephone calls over IP-based networks.
VoIP is also the foundation for more advanced unified communications applications—including Web and video conferencing—that can transform the way you do business. The Internet Protocol (IP) was originally designed for data networking. The success of IP in becoming a world standard for data networking has led to its adaptation to voice networking.
Some history: Although VoIP is becoming more and more popular nowadays, it’s actually not a new solution at all. VoIP has been around in one form or another since 1973 when it began as an experiment by the US Department of Defense (Internet also was a US Military network as you may know).
Why VoIp is Better
The number one reason to switch to VoIP technology for telephone service is for sure costs reduction. VoIP has become popular largely because of the cost advantages to consumers over traditional telephone networks. VoIP based phone services offers cheaper international long distance rates which are generally 10% of what is charged by traditional phone companies. Its portability makes it a very good option and you could avoid expensive hotel phone charges and cell phone roaming charges. What is required is a good Internet connection.
There are many kinds of VoIP all around. Using voice chat in MSN , Google Talk, Yahoo messenger or Skype could be regarded as VoIP; but these are all 
The promise of free international calls whenever you want them probably sounds a little too good to be true. There is probably some small letters somewhere in the agreement, right? Well, yes and no. Provided you only wish to use VoIP to communicate with other VoIP users, everything is very clear. But if you want to use VoIP to be able to make voip sip calls and receive incoming calls from people who don’t have VoIP or you want to make ooutgoing calls to cellular phones or landlines, you will need to subscribe to a VoIP termination gateway and find a proper ISP that provides a bridge betweenVoIP based phone network available from Internet and the conventional phone networks which are all around the globe.
Public Internet phone calling uses the Internet for connecting voip sip phone calls, especially for consumers. But most businesses are using IP telephony across their own managed private networks because it allows them to better handle security and service quality.